Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and sparkling seas — but not buildings. He was scarcely a topographical artist — an impressionist Canaletto, even if Venice was among his themes. Nonetheless, Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery is an intriguing experience.
Before I saw it, the suspicion crossed my mind that this was the solution to a conundrum that must puzzle many galleries. Namely, how to put together another Monet exhibition without it being the same as all the others? An institution such as the National Gallery could not just borrow a lorry-load of Monets and shove them up on the walls — although quite a lot of visitors might be happy enough with that.
Exhibitions are supposed to have a serious point, to explore novel territory. A little unexpectedly, Monet & Architecture succeeds in doing just that. Not only does it contain an array of masterpieces but it also makes you think harder about just what the subject of these pictures really is. Paradoxically, the answer turns out to be that it isn’t architecture.
Although the exhibition is vaguely chronological, this is not a retrospective. Large sections of the painter’s oeuvre are omitted because they depict no man-made edifices. Thus the pictures he did at Étretat in the early 1880s are left out, but there are several of the quite similar ones Monet painted not far along the Norman coast at Varengeville. The reason is that the latter often feature the medieval church and a humble shelter for the local customs officer.
Mind you, those structures were not exactly the subjects of these pictures. A reviewer at the time got it right when he wrote that Monet had put the douanier’s little cottage with its red roof in the corner of one picture ‘to put the rest in tune’ (‘pour donner le la’).
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