Monet -- Battle the Crowds to Get to Rouen Cathedral

There's no getting away from it: Monet & Architecture at London's National Gallery is a crowded exhibition. The first couple of rooms in particular are a bit of a slog as you try to manoeuvre your way along what is essentially a queue of people looking at the earliest (and to be honest, largely least interesting) of the 70-odd works.

But stick with it: You'll eventually come to Rouen Cathedral and to Venice, and thankfully, and rather surprisingly, there's less of a crush to view the momentous art capturing gradations of light and weather on magnificent buildings that you've probably really come to see.

It's often a bit of a problem with the National Gallery's subterranean Sainsbury Wing exhibition space: Some of the rooms are quite small, and here they're fairly densely hung, at least initially. This show, the gallery says, presents a new way of looking at Monet's art, demonstrating how he used architecture to create his compositions. It may be a good idea to watch the informative 15-minute film with curator Richard Thomson before going round rather than afterwards.

The first room is intended to show how Monet, brought up in Normandy, absorbed the concept of the "picturesque" landscape. The first few views of Normandy and Holland aren't particularly gripping, but things look up when we come to Vétheuil, the village on the Seine with a characteristic church where Monet moved with his family in 1878. He painted it in all weathers and from all directions, prefiguring the direction his art would take in later decades. This summer image was made from a boat he had fitted out as a floating studio:

The theme of the picturesque is taken further in the next room, with a focus on the Normandy coastline, in which the buildings seem to play rather only bit parts in comparison to the main actors, the cliffs, as in The Church at Varengeville and the Gorge of Moutiers Pass, one of several dramatic views of the same area.

Monet did something similar in From the Top of the Cliffs at Dieppe, in which the new villas seem to perch on the edge of an alarming precipice above the beach:

Monet was drawn in the 1880s to the Mediterranean, and pictures of Antibes and Bordighera glow with the southern sun. But rather more atmospheric is how he captured his home village of Giverny in the snow, only the blurred outlines of the buildings and the trees providing some sense of location amid the sea of white:

Monet was stimulated to look for motifs showing the more modern world for about a decade after the World's Fair in Paris in 1867, and it's to such images that the show now turns its attention. Promenaders on the beach at Trouville on the Channel coast provide a dynamic perspective, while views of the Pont Neuf and Boulevard des Capucines in Paris seem to be sketches of works that Gustave Caillebotte would render in a more finished fashion a few years later.

Among the most famous images in this section are two of the Gare St Lazare, the station Monet used to travel into Paris from his home at Argenteuil in the 1870s. In place of trees and clouds, the upper levels of the painting are filled with a steel-and-glass roof and the smoke and steam from the engines.

Monet's world is getting more abstracted and the representation of the architecture even more sketchy by 1878, with this depiction of the rue Montorgueil filled with flags to mark a national holiday:

The final sections of the exhibition are devoted to Monet's series of paintings from Rouen, London and Venice -- the Impressionist as we know and love him.

Monet went to Rouen for two extended stays in 1892 and 1893 and painted some 30 canvases. There are seven views of the cathedral on display here, from a range of different viewpoints, accounted for by the fact that he hired painting vantage points from various shopowners. This one, in mid-afternoon sunlight, was from the changing room of a ladies' fashion shop, where the customers' modesty was preserved by a screen separating them from the painter:

There are also eight pictures of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from Monet's trips to London between 1899 and 1904, during which he painted more than 100 canvases. If you've been to see the Impressionists in London show at Tate Britain recently, you'll have a certain sense of déjà vu here, but Monet's fog over Westminster never fails to impress.

We end in Venice, the subject of Monet's last great project before he concentrated on his garden at Giverny in his final years. He took his wife to Venice in 1908 and stayed for two months, producing 37 canvases of motifs including the church of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Doge's Palace. There are nine in this exhibition, all including water in the foreground so that the city seems to float. Here's his ethereal rendering of the Palazzo Contarini on the Grand Canal:

So this is an exhibition that starts off somewhat shakily -- the first few rooms could perhaps have benefited from a little pruning -- but builds to a grand climax. Just be patient, and do your fellow exhibition-goers and the National Gallery staff a favour: Leave your bulky coats and bags in the cloakroom.

Practicalities

Monet & Architecture continues at the National Gallery until July 29. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800, and on Fridays until 2100. Full-price tickets cost £20 Monday to Friday and £22 at weekends, but there aren't many available on the day, so you're better off booking ahead online here and saving £2 per ticket in the process. The audio guide costs another £5, and as we've urged you to use the cloakroom, we'd better tell you that it costs £1.50 per bag or coat. As we've noted before, it's getting more expensive to visit art shows in London, and of course, it's not just a question of the actual tickets.

The National Gallery is on the north side of Trafalgar Square, just a couple of minutes from Charing Cross or Leicester Square stations on the rail and Underground networks.

Images

Claude Monet, The Church at Vétheuil (L'Église de Vétheuil), 1879, Southampton City Art Gallery. (c) Southampton City Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images

Claude Monet, Snow Effect at Giverny (Effet de neige à Giverny), 1893. (c) New Orleans Museum of Art, The Mrs. Frederick M. Stafford Collection

Claude Monet, The rue Montorgueil, Paris. The National Holiday of 30 June, 1878 (La Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Fête du 30 juin, 1878), Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (c) Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894, Private collection. (c) Photo courtesy of the owner

Claude Monet, The Palazzo Contarini (Le Palais Contarini), 1908, Private collection. (c) Photo courtesy of the owner

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later. Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury . Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

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