The Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris is opening a major exhibition dedicated to French Impressionist master Claude Monet to mark the centenary of his death.
The exhibition, titled Monet, Painting Time, runs from 30 September 2026 to 25 January 2027. It explores how the painter captured the passage of time throughout his career, highlighting his mastery of repetition and observation.
Monet, who lived from 1840 to 1926, was a founding figure of Impressionism whose work transformed Western landscape art. The Musée de l'Orangerie, located in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, is world famous for housing Monet's monumental Water Lilies murals, which were donated to the French state after the First World War and installed in two specially designed oval rooms.
Claire Bernardi, the director of the Musée de l'Orangerie, explained that the works on show depict Monet as a man of the instantaneous and demonstrate how he thought about time. Chief curator Cécile Girardeau added that the artist possessed an exceptional ability to dissect duration.
At the center of the exhibition route are three iconic series created by the Impressionist master: Cathedrals, Haystacks, and Poplars. These series depict the same subject across different hours of the day and under varying natural lights, with Rouen Cathedral rendered up to six times.
Monet began painting serial compositions in the late 19th century, setting up multiple canvases outdoors to document shifting light and weather across different seasons. His Haystacks series captured grainstacks in the fields near Giverny from harvest to winter frost, while his Rouen Cathedral paintings recorded the gothic facade under morning mist, full sunlight, and evening dusk.
The exhibition opens with the theme of acceleration and modernity, displaying paintings of steam trains that revolutionized travel and distance during the artist's era. The final gallery, titled cycle and duration, focuses on the Water Lilies series that occupied the final decades of Monet's life at his home in Normandy.
Visitors can view about 40 works alongside a small gallery of family archives and a virtual reality experience retracing the painter's life. The canvases on display were drawn from the reserves of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, as well as several public and private collections.
Parallel exhibition at Musée d'Orsay
Just a ten-minute walk away across the Seine, the Musée d'Orsay is celebrating the artist with a parallel exhibition titled I Spend My Life Painting. The showcase brings out around 50 works from the museum's reserves to focus specifically on Monet's artistic techniques.
Housed in a grand former railway station built for the 1900 Paris International Exposition, the Musée d'Orsay holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist art. It regularly collaborates with the neighboring Musée de l'Orangerie under a joint administrative structure.
Annick Lemoine, head of both the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie, said that presenting how the painter worked offered a fascinating perspective for visitors. She told Agence France-Presse that experts using high-tech scanners had discovered hidden paint layers beneath several works, including some of Monet's most famous canvases.
Modern conservators routinely use non-invasive scanning technologies such as infrared reflectography and X-ray imaging to analyze historic paintings without touching the original surface. These tools allow historians to trace initial compositional sketches and identify changes made by the artist during execution.
Lemoine noted that these underlying discoveries would cause a sensation among art lovers. Advanced scanning revealed erased lines beneath finished surfaces, including an entire house that Monet had painted over and replaced with a bird in his famous 1869 canvas, The Magpie.
Painted near Étretat on the Normandy coast, The Magpie is celebrated as one of Monet's finest snowscapes, famous for its subtle blue shadows on winter snow. Both centenary exhibitions in Paris will remain open to the public until 25 January 2027.
