“IT breaks my heart to see all of my paintings leave for America,” Claude Monet wrote to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1888. Nonetheless, the exodus Monet lamented in one of his more sentimental moments was good for Boston, and good, it turns out, for Sydney.
Next month, the city will play host to no fewer than 29 paintings by Monet from the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings form the backbone of an exhibition called Monet and the Impressionists, which comes to Sydney for 3 1/2 months after a stint in Japan.
Amazingly, despite having sent most of its Monets overseas, the MFA has Monets enough in reserve to impress. The depth of its holdings is astounding. Even more amazing is that, of the more than three dozen paintings by Monet owned by the MFA, only three were actually purchased. The rest were gifts.
What made Bostonians so sympathetic to Monet and his fellow impressionists? The answer is intriguing, for it is not cashed-up collectors or far-sighted critics who get the credit so much as Monet’s fellow artists.
The first painting by Monet to appear in Boston — a seascape — appeared way back in 1866, when the artist was in his mid-20s. It failed to find buyers. So did the three Monets sent to Boston in 1883 by Durand-Ruel: an early salvo in his campaign to convert America to impressionism.
Bostonians may have been “open-minded, curious, quietly sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled”, as Nicholas Grimshaw, president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, put it.(ARTSJOURNAL)