Tate Modern’s first exhibition devoted to Claude Monet, organised with the Musée de l’Orangerie, traces his paintings of passing time from Impressionism to the Water Lilies.
Tate Modern on Bankside opens its first exhibition devoted to Claude Monet, who led the Impressionists, on Thursday 25 February 2027. Organised with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, it runs to Sunday 27 June 2027.
Monet was born in Paris in 1840 and died at Giverny in 1926. Impressionism took its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where a hostile critic turned its title into an insult.
In the 1890s he began to paint one subject again and again: haystacks, poplars and the facade of Rouen Cathedral. Each canvas held a different hour and season. His last decades at Giverny produced the Water Lilies cycle, whose great panels hang at the Orangerie.
Monet worked in London repeatedly. From a sixth-floor suite at the Savoy he painted Waterloo Bridge at sunrise and Charing Cross Bridge in the afternoon. He painted the Houses of Parliament at sunset from St Thomas’ Hospital.
The exhibition takes time as its subject, at the dawn of the industrial age. It brings together rarely seen works with loans from collections worldwide.
It follows how he caught fleeting moments, then the passing of years and seasons.