Melbourne Winter Masterpieces® 2025: French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston #frenantique; #antique

French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston brings together a hundred works of art from Boston's magnificent collection of French Impressionism. And we really wanted to take these artworks and these artists whose names have become so familiar, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and really bring them to a human scale. They've sort of become larger than life in the 150 years since Impressionism got its name. And so we bring in the artists' own voices so they can tell us about themselves and about each other, both in their moments of triumph and their moments of anxiety, their moments of supporting one another, and some moments of pettiness. This exhibition has come about from a wonderful relationship with our colleagues at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It's actually been eight years in development, so it's been a true collaboration and one that we're really proud of. We wanted to actually present the great Boston interiors at the same time these artworks were created, because Bostonians were great collectors. They were going to France, bringing back large groups of works, ultimately bequeathing them to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But we wanted to be able to show that these works that came off the easels in Paris went into these very grand salon-like interiors. And so we've tried to recreate that sense of the grandeur and the splendor that these paintings would have originally been seen in. The design is wonderful in that it has this shift of palette, of mood, of architectural style as you go through, and we've tried to contrast that as much as we can so that each room is a bit of a wow moment. It's an unprecedented design for us, it really is very exuberant, but I think people will absolutely love it, and it will transport them into another time and place. I think this exhibition offers our visitors in these grey winter months a chance to experience the radiant light of the French summer. It allows them to see glorious landscapes, but also to uncover different aspects of Impressionism, including the wonderful urban realists of this movement, and explore some of the stories of Paris in this time of great change. So it's an experience of wonderment at the creative beauty of these paintings, and of the artists who created them. Nothing equals the experience of standing face to face before these paintings in the flesh. They have incredibly vivid textured surfaces, which you just cannot appreciate when looking at them in reproduction. They're almost sculptural in the way that the artist has applied thick gobs of paint, and they have highly textured surfaces. They seem to float before your eyes when you stand in front of them, they literally dazzle you. The colours and the textures come out from the canvas, and they wash across your eyeballs and seem to almost ravish them. They make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You get a real, what the French call a real frisson, a ghostly experience when standing before these works. They really do stir the heart.