Book your tickets to 'Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse' at the Royal Academy
8 February 2016, 00:01 | Updated: 15 December 2016, 11:50
The Royal Academy of Arts presents its spring blockbuster exhibition examining the role of gardens in the paintings of Claude Monet and his contemporaries.
With Monet as the starting point, 'Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse' will span the early 1860s to the 1920s, a period of tremendous social change and innovation in the arts, and will include Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and avant-garde artists of the early 20th Century. It will bring together over 120 works, from public institutions and private collections across Europe and the USA, including 35 paintings by Monet alongside rarely seen masterpieces by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt and Wassily Kandinsky.
Arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, Monet was also an avid horticulturist who cultivated gardens wherever he lived. "I perhaps owe it to flowers," he wrote, "that I became a painter." A rich selection of documentary materials including horticultural books and journals, as well as receipts for purchases of plants and excerpts from letters, will be included in the exhibition.
Highlights of the exhibition will include a magnificent selection of Monet’s water lily paintings including the great Agapanthus Triptych of 1916-19, (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis) works that are closely related to the great panorama that he donated to the French State in 1922 and that are now permanently housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. It will be the first time this monumental triptych has been seen in the UK.
Exhibition sponsored by BNY Mellon, Partner of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, Royal Academy of Arts, until 20 April 2016.
To book tickets go to the Royal Academy of Arts website >
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse
30 January 2016 to 20 April 2016
Key. 98 / Cat. 1
Claude Monet, The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias), 1873
Oil on canvas, 61 x 82.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Janice H. Levin, in Honour of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, inv. 1991.27.1
Photo © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Exhibition co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art
