In the footsteps of the Impressionists in Paris

Follow in the footsteps of the impressionists in Paris and immerse yourself in the rich inventory they left the world…

Imagine the excitement in Paris in the early 1870s. The wide pavements on Baron Haussman’s new boulevards were filling up with café terraces and Charles Garnier’s snazzy new Opera House was taking shape. But for the up-and-coming artists, busy trying out new techniques, things started with more of a whimper than a bang. Rejected by the art establishment, they set up their own exhibition in Boulevard des Capucines, just along from the Opera, but the critics were not impressed and sniffed that the work displayed was just ‘indecipherable palette scrapings’.

The critics have been proved wrong, wrong, wrong because among the artists exhibiting their work were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Paul Cézanne. It was the moment the Impressionist movement was born. Monet himself suggested the title ‘Impression, Sunrise’ for his painting of Le Havre’s port, which prompted a visiting reviewer to describe the group as ‘impressionists’. He may have meant it dismissively, but the name certainly stuck.

The Impressionists were a breath of fresh air, often preferring to paint outdoors, trying to capture brief moments, using quick brushstrokes to focus on light and colour. It worked! Today, their work is found in prestigious galleries all over the world, as well as on the prints, tea towels and keyrings which tourists buy as souvenirs of Paris, the world capital of Impressionism.

Here are the 5 top places to visit in and around Paris to find out more.

The Musée d’Orsay

Manet painting of the luncheon on the grass — *Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe at the Orsay Museum*

Definitely the place to start! On the 5^th floor you’ll find a mini history of Impressionism, with many well-known paintings displayed in chronological order, along with info panels which help you build up a picture of the movement. Among the star exhibits are Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, which caused such a stir at the first Exhibition of Impressionism, Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, countryside scenes by Sisley, Pissarro and Cézanne and well-known Monet works of, for example, water lilies, poppy fields and the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Further on are works which followed Impressionism, showing how the artists influenced what came later. The ‘pointillist’ Georges Seurat painted scenes using thousands of little coloured dots and the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin used the movement’s vibrant colours in his depictions of life in Tahiti. Famous Vincent Van Gogh works here include Starry Night, Bedroom at Arles and a haunting self-portrait which he painted while living in an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Explanatory notes help you understand what you see, explaining for example that Van Gogh’s ‘swirling turquoise background reveals an inner turmoil.’

The Orsay Museum covers about 75 years, from 1850 onwards, so if you have time, you can visit other areas exhibiting works from before and after the main period of Impressionism which will set everything in context.

Musée Marmottan Monet

Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise — *Impression, Sunrise by Monet*

A 10-minute walk from La Muette metro station (Line 9), an elegant mansion houses the world’s leading collections of both Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot, not least the painting which began the whole movement, Impression, Sunrise. (A note pops up on the website if it’s currently on loan elsewhere!)

Over 100 of Monet’s paintings were donated to the museum by his son, Michel Monet. Here you can wallow in a whole selection of Monet’s lily paintings, alongside other well-known works such as The Train in the Snow and Taking a Walk at Argenteuil. There are also portraits by Renoir of both Monet and his wife, as well as photographs and a sculpted bust of a distinguished, elderly Monet.

The Marmottan also has more paintings by Berthe Morisot – the best-known female Impressionist – than anywhere else, some 25 in total, alongside prints and drawings. They include charming domestic scenes such as The Cherry Tree and Children Playing at a Basin, showing her daughter Julie and a friend playing in their kitchen. It’s a chance to learn much more about this under-rated artist, who lived nearby and whose portrait, painted by her brother-in-law Édouard Manet, is also on display here.

The Orangerie

Handily situated at the Place de la Concorde end of the Tuileries Gardens, the Orangerie, a little gem of a gallery is home to something very special: Monet’s lily paintings, eight enormous panels begun during the First World War and bequeathed to the nation on the day after the Armistice was signed in 1918. They are displayed in a room designed to Monet’s own specifications, creating, as he put it, ‘a refuge of peaceful meditation’. Also in the collection are a number of Cézanne canvases, both country scenes and still lifes, plus a good range of early 20^th century works by, for example, Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse.

Monet’s house, Giverny

There’s a good argument for detouring from Paris to Giverny. Make time to stop off at the village church, Sainte Radégonde, where Monet is buried, visit the pretty village

And allow a couple of hours to visit Monet’s house where he spent the last 45 years of his life and the garden he designed and painted so often. Rounding the pond, with its clusters of lily pads, abundance of trees and Japanese bridge, you feel as if you are inside a Monet canvas. Nearing the house, you find the flower beds arranged by colour, like an artist’s palette, and behind them, the dusky pink house with its dark green shutters.

Monet's Garden Giverny — Monet’s Garden Giverny

Inside the house, you feel Monet all around you, not least in the bright colours he selected for each room: pale blue for the salon, with all the wooden details picked out in turquoise, sunshine yellow for everything – walls, cabinets, chairs – in the dining room. In the drawing room, originally his first studio, are reproductions of his own paintings, which he said represented ‘every stage of my life’. As the guidebook says, in this house ‘the whole story of impressionism is told’, for all through it you see copies of the works by other artists with which Monet chose to surround himself. They include Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day’ and 30 more works by Renoir, Morisot, Degas and Pissarro.

Maison Impressioniste, Argenteuil

Why not take a train to Argenteuil, as many Impressionist artists did, where you can visit the house where Monet lived (maisonimpressioniste.fr) during the 1870s and which is now a museum. It takes just 15 minutes from Gare Saint-Lazare and the museum is two minutes’ walk from the station. Monet painted some 250 canvases while in Argenteuil, then a country town, many of them of this house, the town and the surrounding countryside. The house and garden are much as he knew them and the displays include digital copies of some of his paintings, a film (with English subtitles) about Monet’s life and a reproduction of the ‘boat studio’ which he set up on the river at Argenteuil.

Marian Jones is a former teacher of French now travel writer with a podcast – City Breaks, bringing listeners and readers the background history and culture which will inform their travels in l’Hexagone. citybreakspodcast.co.uk