A Tale of Three Cities: Claude Monet in Rouen, London and Venice

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of painter Claude Monet (1840–1926). To commemorate this occasion, the Institut français d’Écosse is hosting a lecture by Richard Thomson, Research Professor in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh.

In his fifties and sixties, Claude Monet travelled to three very different cities to paint. In 1892 and 1893 he worked in Rouen, exhibiting his series of the cathedral in 1895. He made successive visits to London in 1899, 1900 and 1901, finally showing the work in 1904. In 1909 he travelled to Venice, though those canvases were not exhibited until 1912. Monet was fascinated by the very different architecture that served as his motifs, but also by the different conditions that he found, such as the industrial smog of London and the Mediterranean light of Venice. Surveying his canvases and comparing them with contemporaries, this lecture will look at Monet’s paintings like a tourist of the Belle Époque.