The National Gallery of Victoria will in 2025 bring back the short-lived French Impressionism exhibition for its Winter Masterpieces series. Originally staged in 2021 , French Impressionism was open for only 30 days before COVID restrictions meant the exhibition closed, and the loaned pieces were shipped back to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Racehorses at Longchamp 1871, by Edgar Degas, possibly reworked in 1874.
Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The re-staged exhibition will be both the same and different. Featuring work by artists including Renoir, Monet, Degas, Cassatt and Cezanne, the bulk of the original show will be returning, except for one painting and one print, while the exhibition design will be re-imagined and the order of the rooms will be changed slightly. “The 19th century interior” will be one of the cues designers look to, explains Miranda Wallace, senior curator at NGV.
It will nod to “the context in which a lot of these paintings ended up, in terms of the Boston homes that they were bought for before they were donated,” she says. Victorine Meurent, self-portrait c. 1876.
Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston “It’ll have more of a period feel to it than the last exhibition did, which was very contemporary.” Ted Gott, also a senior curator at the gallery, says: “It was very modern, the last installation. This one will be very warm and sensuous.
” One of the undercurrents of French Modernism is the relationships the featured artists had with.
