NGV French Impressionism exhibition expresses rage, self-doubt and joy of artists including Monet and Manet

Australia Broadcast Center

11-07-2025

The Impressionists were the original rebels — rallying against the status quo of the time; painting with pastels; and capturing abstract and brightly coloured landscape scenery in their paintings, which were considered shocking in the 1860s and 1870s.
Now, more than 100 works by French Impressionist painters including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, are on show at the National Gallery of Victoria — many in Australia for the first time.
The exhibition's curator Katie Hanson shares five paintings to look out for.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was invited by his art dealer to host a solo show in the spring of 1883, and this painting featured in it. It sums up the last 15 years of Renoir's creative output.
Renoir, the Impressionist associated with painting figures and people socialising, here paints "dappled light as it's coming through the trees, and the casual sense of people outdoors", Hanson explains.
"This painting pulls on all of your senses … There are half-consumed glasses of beer, discarded matches and cigarette butts and a bouquet of flowers — all triggering your sense of smell.
"Renoir brings you on this sensory journey with him.
"Art historians aren't 100% in agreement with who the model is that inspired the dancer in this painting.
"I believe it's a hybrid of two models — Suzanne Valadon and Aline Victorine Charigot — who became the artist's wife in due course."
Hanon says this is a painting Renoir produced in a period "full of self-doubt".
"He is questioning whether all this feathery brushwork and soft atmospheric painting is the right direction for him. He goes on painting trips to the south of France and Italy looking at Raphael and Botticelli, thinking, 'I need to add more firmness and resolve into my paintings for them to be serious and worthy of history.'
"He is wrapped in self-doubt, yet the artwork shows so much joy and luminosity."
Monet said he was "mad with rage" when he painted this field of grain near his house around 1891, Hanson says.
"The weather was quickly changing and affecting his work. He is in a very black mood and disgusted with his painting — it [was] continual torture for him.
"Monet scraped things down and tore up his work as he tried to get the atmosphere right. The painting is quiet and seemingly simple, but when you know of the tremendous struggle he went through, you see this in a new light."
While he was painting Grainstack (Snow Effect), Monet decided to show 15 of the paintings in his grainstack (or haystack) series at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891.
Not everyone agreed with Monet's artistic decision. His good friend Pissarro questioned the artist, believing he was motivated by commercial interests.
"[Pissarro] described the exhibition as one of the terrible results of success," Hanson says.
The model in this painting, Victorine Meurent, an artist in her own right, and a successful can-can dancer in the US, worked with Manet for more than a decade and appears in many of his best well-known works.
"She is someone who is famous and unknown at once," Hanson says.
"This captures a wonderful moment in history with new light being shined on her life. We get to know her as a real person — not just the myth and legacy as a woman posing for Manet."
In the 19th century, Street Singer was a headache for some art collectors, who weren't sure if they could touch it.
"To be seen eating in public was seen as gauche, and the cherries to the mouth was seen as a problem," Hanson says.
It was purchased by American art collector Sarah Choate Sears and her husband Joshua for their Boston home until it was donated to the Boston fine arts museum in 1966.
Hanson describes this 1865 painting of urban beach goers by Monet's great mentor, Boudin, as "exquisite".
"Monet said he owed his career and success to [Boudin]. It was he who saw the caricatures Monet sketched as a teenager and thought this kid had talent [and] approached him to try painting outdoors."
Boudin's attention to detail, and to the fashion of the time, is on show.
"These are people going to the beach in crinoline skirts and multi-layered petticoats," Hanson says. "You notice these white structures that look like tents, but they're actually bathing machines that were popular in this time. These people would go in there to change their bathing suits, and the machine could be pulled into the water by a swimming attendant.
"You could splash about without your modesty being disrupted."
This painting of a poppy field near Monet's home in Giverny, France, is often reproduced.
But to sit with Monet's painting in real life is to experience it in a very different way, Hanson says.
"[You can see] the range of touches and blobs of paint that he turns into poppies and the longer strokes he makes to create the grass. You can instantly imagine these poppies in the breeze.
"He makes you appreciate how splendid and unexpected nature is. That is part of his enduring appeal; in finding beauty in the most mundane of things.
"Monet is restless in his artistic vision though, and never stopped looking for new ways to paint a favourite motif."
French Impressionism is at NGV International until October 5.