Best known for his Waterlily series painted en plein air (or, outdoors), Claude Monet was one of the founding figures of the first Impressionist exposition in 1874. This exhibition, however, takes Monet’s earlier cityscapes of Paris as its central focus. In 1867, the artist asked for special authorization to paint “views of Paris from the windows of the Louvre.” Rather than copy the masterpieces inside the museum, as had generations of artists before him, Monet turned his view in the opposite direction—toward the city itself.

Picturing Paris: Monet and the Modern City brings together three of Monet’s important cityscapes of Paris, all painted from an elevated viewpoint inside the Louvre: Oberlin College’s Garden of the Princess, Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin’s Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, and the Kunstmuseum in the Hague’s Quai du Louvre. These works are some of Monet’s earliest renderings of the city, painted shortly after the opening of Paris’s Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) of 1867; they attest to the city’s importance as a growing modern metropolis.

This exhibition is a partnership with the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

Image: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Garden of the Princess, Louvre, 1867. Oil on canvas. R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1948.296.