Welcome to the National Gallery and to this lecture
about the 'Monet and Architecture' exhibition reviewed.
It's a great pleasure and a privilege
to have been the guest curator for 'Monet and Architecture',
and it's been a delight to work with the very impressive team
here at the National Gallery, particularly my old friend Chris Riopelle,
the Curator of 19th Century Painting who's played such a major part in this.
The exhibition has been a huge success with the public
and with the press over the last three months,
and as it draws to a close, it's a pleasure for me to reflect
on what the exhibition has meant to me,
other curators and scholars,
and also, of course, the general public.
It's a great excitement for somebody in my position,
who came up with the concept and made the selection,
to actually see the works coming together in the exhibition.
Here is an image of the last room in the exhibition,
the paintings made by Monet in Venice in 1908,
which he finally exhibited in 1912.
This brings the exhibition to a close
because this was the last time Monet had an exhibition
in which buildings played a substantial part in his paintings.
Here in the final room, we see two people
looking at a couple of paintings of the Doge's Palace,
and on the other side two others looking at two paintings
of Santa Maria della Salute.
Monet in Venice makes a splendid finale.
We have nine paintings of Venice in the exhibition,
which is a quarter of the pictures that he painted when he was there.
What is particularly gratifying about this image
is that the viewers, the visitors to the exhibition,
are making comparisons, they're looking carefully at the pictures,
they're responding, for example, to the ‘Doge's Palace’ pictures
and looking at the slight change in light effects
that we get in the two paintings,
and that is exactly the sort of thing
that one wants people to do, to look closely.
To discuss the hang of the exhibition
is, I think, of interest.
When the works arrive in the exhibition
and are unpacked, taken out of their cases,
they take on a real identity which they haven't had before,
because one hasn't seen them in this context,
and with the pictures that one had hoped to hang them with.
Here on the left, we see three pictures
of 'The Cliff at Varengeville',
with the church on the top, painted in 1882.
One might have thought of hanging the pictures on the left
and on the right there together,
because they're painted from the same viewpoint
and show the old medieval church of Saint Valery
on the top of the cliffs from a very, very similar,
but not exactly identical viewpoint.
And yet the painting of the church seen from the beach,
with the great cliff forming a wall in front,
absolutely insisted on being the centrepiece,
and so that is the way we hung that picture,
that group of pictures.
And on the right, we see another trio of paintings,
which I'm going to talk about in a moment,
but here you can see another sequence that I particularly wanted,
which don't obviously form a trio,
because the subjects are different, two are the same and one's different,
but again this is something that one put together
to try and make the public, the visitor, think:
What is happening here? Why are these together?
I'll come back to these in a moment.
The 'Monet and Architecture' exhibition
was strongly supported by private collectors,
to whom we are extremely grateful.
There are something like 80 paintings in the exhibition,
and about a quarter of them have come from private collections.
And here is just a cross section of half a dozen of those.
It's been a great advantage to this exhibition
that it's in the National Gallery,
a very, very prestigious museum,
and that the exhibition has been just here at a single venue,
and both those things have encouraged private collectors
to be so generous.
Just this cross section of pictures from private collections
shows something of the aim of the 'Monet and Architecture' exhibition.
The idea was to try and make people look at Monet differently,
to look at how buildings,
man-made constructions in his paintings,
actually counted for different things in his work.
Monet was primarily a painter.
His decisions were fundamentally pictorial.
For example, he used buildings as regular shapes
in the irregularity of nature,
as you can see in 'The Cliff at Varengeville'
at the top-right,
where you get the angled roof of the little customs officer's cabin
amongst the ragged edges of the cliffs.
He also used buildings for chromatic purposes,
adding an accent of colour,
so there in the same picture
you get the warm colour of the roof
set against the cooler colours of the grass on the clifftop.
Sometimes Monet used buildings
to act as screens on which light played,
and there you see that in this picture,
like the absolutely splendid example of his 'Rouen Cathedral' series
that we have in the centre.
The little picture at the top of the staircase, 'L'Escalier',
is an exceptional picture because Monet only painted
a handful, a tiny handful of pictures
where the viewpoint that he took is actually surrounded by buildings,
as you get here, so that was a particularly exciting painting to get.
But buildings suggested all sorts of other things to him.
Buildings suggested modernity,
and so the picture at the top-left
shows modern villas built in the suburbs of Paris.
But also Monet was a tourist,
modernity at the end of the 19th century, the spread of railways,
the development of travel guides and so on,
encouraged people to visit cities like Rouen and Venice
to see the great architecture of the cathedrals
and churches and palazzi.
And so the exhibition
pulls people's attention widely towards different purposes
that Monet used buildings in his paintings for.
And we had the opportunity
to see new conjunctions of pictures.
So, for example, here on the left is a painting I know very well,
the picture of 'The Church at Vétheuil'
from the National Gallery of Scotland,
and with great good fortune we were able to borrow
this other painting on the right-hand side,
a slightly larger painting,
painted from more or less the same viewpoint,
but at a slightly different date.
Monet arrived in Vétheuil in September 1878,
and the picture on the right must have been painted
shortly after his arrival because the trees are still in summer leaf,
and the Edinburgh picture has slightly brown trees, still foliated,
and that suggests slightly later in the year,
so perhaps on the right September and on the left October
or even early November.
And here these paintings of the church,
a very famous medieval building
with a late Renaissance facade,
is set in the context of the very ordinary village;
Monet the naturalist, Monet not prepared to
elaborate or decorate things, but painting things as they were.
Another aspect of an exhibition is that it brings together
pictures that aren't seen together and they teach one things.
Even someone who's an expert in the field
or has worked in a field for a long time can see new things.
For example, in these two pictures of Bordighera,
the Italian coastal town he visited in 1884,
one can see at the bottom-right of the right-hand picture
and the centre-right margin of the left-hand picture,
one can see how he used a lavender-green combination
to give a sense of dense foliage
that doesn't have much definition,
and one's seeing Monet coming up with shortcuts,
coming up with little tricks that will help him
in one campaign of painting,
and that sort of discovery is a great surprise.
I mentioned that I would come back to these pictures,
the two painted at Trouville in the summer of 1870,
and then one painted in London just a few months later.
And putting these pictures together interested me particularly
because, although the subjects are different,
the compositions are very similar.
In the ‘Trouville’ pictures, he used the boardwalk
leading into the space
as a perspectival device
which he didn't clutter up near to the spectator,
but did deeper in.
So the eye is drawn up that perspective at some speed,
into the picture before it sees anything of interest.
And that's a device that he used in the picture
of the Houses of Parliament on the right-hand side
just a few months later.
And, interestingly, Trouville had only been developed as a seaside resort
over the last 20 years,
and when Monet painted ‘The Thames below Westminster’ there in 1871,
the Victoria Embankment and the Houses of Parliament
had only just been completed,
so he was painting something that was, again,
a very new, modern environment,
using a modern thrusting, speedy composition
for these modern compositions.
And one comes up also with some very unusual combinations.
Monet painted about 35 paintings
when he was in London around 1900
from the Savoy Hotel looking towards Charing Cross Bridge,
and of those over 30 paintings
only two of them show Cleopatra's Needle,
which was immediately underneath his balcony at the hotel,
and neither of those paintings which show Cleopatra's Needle were completed,
he edited out the Needle and the Embankment at the bottom-right.
And it's absolutely marvellous that in this exhibition
we have been able to have one of these unfinished pictures
with Cleopatra's Needle,
and two of the finished paintings without it,
that show the variations that Monet brought about.
And clearly, he didn't want that emphatic vertical in the foreground,
he was fascinated by the play of light on the surface of the Thames
as he looked southwards in the late morning and afternoon,
and that is what he painted in these finished pictures.
Of course, some paintings got away.
The exhibition opens with this picture of 'La Lieutenance at Honfleur',
painted in 1864,
and it would have been marvellous to have had its other version
on the right-hand side,
because 1864 was when Monet was 23,
he was young, this was the very beginning of his career,
and it's interesting that he started painting...
architecture, important buildings
like the picturesque, old 'La Lieutenance at Honfleur'
right at the beginning of his career, in a pair of pictures
showing slightly different light effects.
We might also have got a couple of Amsterdam paintings that we missed,
which he painted in the mid-1870s when he visits that city,
and I put these two pictures in with images from a contemporary guide book
written by a man that Monet actually knew,
because again there was a question of: should we include in the exhibition
material like guide books, which Monet certainly consulted,
or railway posters, which he would have known,
that set the context for the exhibition?
And we decided not to,
that would clutter the exhibition and we would rely
exclusively on Monet's paintings.
I think that was the right decision
given the intensity with which people have looked at the pictures,
and, of course, the beautifully designed catalogue
has all the comparative material
such as images from guidebooks and railway posters
that are needed to explain Monet more thoroughly.
Another trio of pictures I would like to have put together
is this one, we have the two paintings on the left,
the painting of the Japanese bridge from the National Gallery,
and the painting of Vétheuil in the centre.
It was a shame we weren't able to get the picture on the right-hand side,
because I wanted to have a triptych of these
more-or-less square and more-or-less symmetrical paintings
that Monet painted around 1900.
And to have had the picture of the 'Grande Allée' on the right-hand side
with the garden path going straight up the centre towards Monet's house
would have made a wonderful pair
with the National Gallery's own Japanese bridge,
with that symmetry giving a wonderfully harmonious
and calm quality to these paintings
made at a difficult and rather sad time in Monet's life.
Sometimes pictures are difficult to get
because of other exhibitions,
and right at the beginning of the modernity section
we were not able to get this picture of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,
the great church in central Paris,
but we were very fortunate to get this painting
of the 'Quai du Louvre' from The Hague,
which is a splendid painting,
so animated in the way it gives
the movement of modern Paris in the foreground
and then sets that against the stillness
of the monuments of the city in the background,
the medieval church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont,
the eighteenth-century dome of the Panthéon,
and to the right the smaller dome of the 17th century Val-de-Grace.
There's one final absence that I'd like to admit to,
and that is this picture on the right.
We are extremely lucky
that the Musée d'Orsay lent us the 'Rue Montorgueil',
this wonderful painting from 1878,
showing the French public celebrating the success
of the Exposition Universelle that year,
a painting of modernity and flourish,
a painting that shows tremendous energy
as the population of Paris celebrated their national success.
When Monet was back in London at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century,
in 1901 he painted a view from Leicester Square
looking westwards, in fact he painted this motif three times,
and to have had a similar view
from a high window looking down on the city
here at night with this perspectival view up the street hidden,
would have made a wonderful dramatic contrast,
but unfortunately we were not able to borrow that picture.
I'm particularly pleased
that the public has enjoyed the exhibition.
It's had a splendid response on social media:
'I will never look at his work the same way again.'
That is exactly the sort of thing one wants to hear.
Somebody said: 'It was utterly beguiling.' Monet is indeed a beguiling painter,
but the idea that one has drawn people into looking
at Monet's work in a different way is something that's very gratifying,
and there were a number of comments about how the exhibition is a masterclass,
and that suggests that the curator's role
is to lay the works of art out
in a way that is suggestive and inspiring
and encourages the viewer to look freshly and closely,
and that's what we can see in this installation photograph here.
The woman on the left-hand side is looking very attentively
at that picture of 'The Doge's Palace',
looking no doubt at the brushwork and the colour at the bottom of the canvas,
and in the centre you can see a lady
who's holding out a little booklet,
and it was a very, very clever idea of the National Gallery's
not to have wall labels down by the canvases, by the frames,
but to have all the information about the pictures in a little booklet.
And watching people go around the exhibition I think one can see
that people have been greatly inspired by that,
because they can stand back from the picture,
read what it says in the little booklet,
then look at the painting again, as this lady is doing in the centre there,
and that I think has been a very good innovation.
Finally, I would show a slide here
of the teachers' session that we had in June,
and it shows in the background, as it happens,
the wonderful sequence of five paintings of 'Rouen Cathedral' that we had,
pictures that Monet showed as a series in 1895,
and to be able to show five of the twenty
that he exhibited in that year all together
is something that we're very thrilled about.
But I think it's important here that the spectators, the visitors, are teachers.
These are people who go into schools
and they're going to encourage their pupils to look closely at pictures,
to enjoy going to exhibitions,
but to be an active participant in the experience of looking,
and I think that is above all something of great importance.
If 'Monet and Architecture' has succeeded at all as an exhibition,
and the visitor numbers and responses we've had suggest it has,
then it's because Monet is a beautiful and varied painter.
His long career gives an extraordinary diversity of subjects and handling,
and these pictures give a great sense of joy,
but, above all, that encourages people to look closely
and that is what this exhibition has done.
Thank you very much.