A Second Chance at Impressionism: NGV’s French Impressionism Show

The National Gallery of Victoria’s restaging of French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston arrives with a sense of both elegance and excitement (6 Jun – 5 Oct 2025). Drawn from Boston’s renowned holdings, more than 100 paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Manet, Cassatt, Morisot, Signac and Sisley bring to Melbourne audiences a movement whose radical brushwork, saturated colour and novel viewpoints changed the course of art.

The 2025 presentation makes up for the pandemic‑curtailed 2021 run and also marks the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition. It is part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series—an annually anticipated blockbuster—but the curators have emphasised letters and journals to foreground the artists’ voices, hinting at a deeper engagement beyond spectacle.

Immersive Design and Staging

Visitors enter through a long corridor dressed like a Bostonian drawing room, complete with parquet floors, columns and padded furniture; only two works—Renoir’s Woman with a Parasol and Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside and Monet’s Meadow with Poplars—hang on the walls. The scenography, inspired by East‑Coast collector mansions, situates the paintings within the period’s domestic elegance and hints at the American collectors whose taste shaped the MFA Boston’s holdings. Throughout the show, rooms shift mood: dark green damask for the Barbizon predecessors, duck‑egg stripes and lattice trim for watery gardens, embossed wallpaper and faux gaslight for urban realism, and opulent red‑and‑gold salons for Renoir’s experiments. It is a theatrical approach that immerses visitors in fin‑de‑siècle atmospheres while blurring the boundary between gallery and set.

Rhythm of Galleries and Highlights

After the opening, more traditional hangs return, with thematic rooms dedicated to precursors, still life, urban scenes, and printmaking. A suite of Henri Fantin‑Latour’s roses, Cézanne’s fruit, and Berthe Morisot’s delicate needlework invites quiet contemplation, the next gallery dives into gritty cityscapes and Pissarro’s mentor‑and‑mentee relationships. The crescendo comes in a lilac‑white space filled with sixteen canvases by Claude Monet, including Water Lilies (1905) and Grainstack (Snow Effect) (1891), which demonstrate his obsession with changing light over decades. A final corridor of black‑and‑white photographic portraits of the artists and a projected film of Monet in his garden creates an intimate epilogue.

Highlights and Surprises

• Self‑portrait by Victorine Meurent — A revelation in the exhibition, Meurent’s inclusion acknowledges her as an artist, not just Manet’s model. Her self‑portrait, with butter‑yellow silk and violet bow, asserts a confident painterly gaze and adds a feminist thread to the narrative.

• Jean‑François Raffaëlli’s The Garlic Seller – This realist canvas of Paris’s outskirts brings working‑class grit into the show, reminding visitors that Impressionism intersected with social realism.

• Degas’s Degas’s Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar – Recently conserved, this double portrait emphasises domestic intimacy and sound, contrasting with Degas’s more familiar ballerinas.

Get your tickets to the show here.

National Gallery of Victoria / 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne VIC 3004 / Daily 10am–5pm / enquiries@ngv.vic.gov.au / www.ngv.vic.gov.au