National Gallery of Canada planning Claude Monet exhibit in 2015

PanARMENIAN.Net - The National Gallery of Canada will mount an exhibition of paintings by Claude Monet in 2015, and a year later an exhibition of the work by the woman who was the court painter to Marie Antoinette, Ottawa Citizen said.

Monet was a founder of impressionism, and 88 years after his death in 1926 his bright, diaphanous paintings of the French countryside remain extremely popular around the world. A Monet painting is a must-see in any gallery that can afford to have one.

The National Gallery’s latest Monet exhibition opens in October, 2015, and will focus on the artist’s use of bridges in his paintings. “Monet used the bridge almost as a symbol, as a subject to develop his modernism further and further,” said gallery director and CEO Marc Mayer in an interview.

The exhibition by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, best known for her work at the royal court in France, will run from June to September, 2016.

Many of Monet’s paintings feature bridges, including the 1903 work Waterloo Bridge, The Sun in a Fog, which is one of the true masterpieces in the National Gallery’s permanent collection. It remains to be seen which other Monet paintings will be featured in the 2015 exhibit, but it’s likely there’ll be at least one from the series of 12 paintings he did of the small, wooden footbridge on a property he owned in Giverny, France.

The National Gallery last featured Monet’s work in 2000 in the exhibition Monet-Renoir, which attracted more than 175,000 visitors, a number that wasn’t bested by a single exhibition until the 2013 exhibit Van Gogh Up Close.

Vigée Le Brun doesn’t have Monet’s widespread name recognition outside of the art world, but her patron does. Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France, is one of the most storied figures in the history of the French monarchy, and is still brought to life in movies and books more than 200 years after she died on the guillotine.

Vigée Le Brun was the daughter of an artist and a hairdresser, which, given the elaborate hairstyles of the French nobility in the 18th century, would seem to have made her ideal for the Bourbon court. Her work came to the attention of Marie Antoinette, and Vigée Le Brun would go on to complete more than 30 portraits of the queen and the royal family.

When the royal family was arrested during the French Revolution and the king and queen executed, the artist had to flee France. She eventually landed in Russia, where she painted portraits of the family of Catherine the Great.

Vigée Le Brun’s 1796 portrait of the Countess Nikolai Alexandrovich Tolstoya, a relative of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, was loaned to the National Gallery in 2011. The lender was not identified by the gallery, but The New York Times reported that the portrait had been sold in 2010 for approximately $4 million U.S.