We had a very nice day during the week when we went to the Victorian National Gallery to see the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces Exhibition.
This was a display of over 100 paintings by French Impressionists from the late 19th Century. The paintings were on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Because many of these masterpieces are in collections in stately homes, the Gallery had converted its exhibition space into replica rooms. These were aimed to look like the grand nineteenth-century residences of East Coast American collectors – where works such as these would have been displayed. Some of the spaces were also replicas of the spaces in which the artists worked themselves.
The artists included famous names such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac and Alfred Sisley.
In their day, these artists were regarded as being very avant-garde. At the centre of this late 19th Century period, they were seen as radical experimenters who boldly rejected the staid artistic conventions of their time.
These are some of the famous paintings that we enjoyed seeing:
Grainstack in the morning snow by Claude Monet
Grand Canal, Venice by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Dance at Bougival #1 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Houses at Auvers by Vincent van Gogh
Portrait of Madame Lucien Guitry by Louise Abbema
Garlic Seller by Jean‐François Raffaëlli
Our Gallery does these exhibitions very well. As you can see by the number of people in my photos, this exhibition was well attended. It closes later in October.
Even the gift shop was decked out in complimentary impressionist fashion.
