Monet Monet Monet

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Monet, the Impressionist par excellence, and unsurprisingly there's no shortage of Monet-related exhibitions, particularly in France, to mark the occasion. So if you want to fill 2026 with luminous, atmospheric landscapes and dreamy water lilies, we have some dates for your diary. We'll take the big shows in chronological order, which means crossing the border into Germany for the first of them. We can vouch for it that Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Etretat at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is an excellent exhibition; we saw it in Lyon late last year. Monet was fascinated by the chalk cliffs around the fishing village of Etretat with their eroded formations -- creating bizarre doors and needles -- and he produced a series of pictures showing the light and weather effects on the land and sea. There are 24 works by him on display; Monet's the star, but you'll also find dozens mo...

Monet Monet Monet

We'll take the big shows in chronological order, which means crossing the border into Germany for the first of them. We can vouch for it that Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Etretat at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is an excellent exhibition; we saw it in Lyon late last year. Monet was fascinated by the chalk cliffs around the fishing village of Etretat with their eroded formations -- creating bizarre doors and needles -- and he produced a series of pictures showing the light and weather effects on the land and sea. There are 24 works by him on display; Monet's the star, but you'll also find dozens more by Courbet, Delacroix, Matisse and many others, all inexorably drawn to Etretat. The show is on from March 19 to July 5.

Let's head to Normandy itself, and Giverny, where Monet settled in 1883. The garden he created, with its water-lily pond, is a place of tourist pilgrimage, overrun by crowds, but we prefer the calmness of the Musée des impressionnismes just down the road. They're concentrating there on Monet's early years in the village, before he bought the piece of land across what was then a railway line to make his pond. Monet in Giverny: Before the Water Lilies, 1883-1890 will have around 30 works showing how Monet explored the attractions of his new surroundings. It's on from March 27 to July 5. Monet's house and garden, by the way, reopens on April 1 and you can already book admission tickets online.

Monet grew up in Le Havre, where the River Seine enters the sea, and MuMa, the city's art museum splendidly located at the harbour mouth, is putting on a show looking at the artist's early career. Monet in Le Havre will take visitors back to 1845, when the young Claude, aged about 5, arrived in the port with his family, and through to 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, when he completed a final series of views of the port. With around 80 works, this exhibition will run from June 5 to September 27.

Monet's most famous water lilies are of course in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and that's the venue for Monet: Painting Time, which is on from September 30 to January 25. This selection of almost 40 pictures has been chosen to reveal how Monet's series paintings, showing motifs such as haystacks, poplars or indeed Rouen Cathedral in various lights and at different hours of the day, can be viewed as an attempt to dissect time.

The show will be accompanied by a virtual-reality experience entitled Monet in Real Time, taking the visitor on a 20-minute journey from Argenteuil along the Seine to Giverny through his paintings, capturing the seasonal and daily changes in light effects and telling the history of his house and garden, his struggle with blindness and his evolution towards an almost abstract style of painting.

Now, there's one more big exhibition on our schedule, and it looks a good one. According to the official French tourist website Voyages impressionnistes, the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which holds the largest collection of Monet's works, is planning a show of landscapes from Monet to David Hockney, looking at Monet's influence on painters through the 20th century and into the 21st. It's due to run from September 24 to January 31, though there's nothing on the Marmottan's website as we write.

And if you're in northern England and can't get to any of the aforementioned locations, you may be lucky enough to have a Monet painting coming to a gallery near you. The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil, which he painted in 1872, has been chosen from the National Gallery collection in London for this year's Masterpiece Tour. The scheme is aimed at ensuring people around the UK can "engage with the national collection," and the painting is at South Shields Museum & Art Gallery until March 25; it then goes on show at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool from March 28 to June 13 and the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull from June 19 to September 13.

This year's edition of the Normandie Impressionniste art festival will celebrate Monet's garden in Giverny, with contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei probably the most prominent among them, creating an itinerary of works along the course of the Seine and elsewhere in Normandy from June to September in tribute. There are no details as yet, but check the festival website nearer the time, and keep an eye on Voyages impressionnistes, which should list all relevant events as well.

Images

Claude Monet (1840-1926), The Cliff and the Porte d'Aval, 1885, Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, Potsdam. Photo © Hasso Plattner Collection
Claude Monet, Les Nymphéas: Reflets verts (detail), between 1914 and 1926, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. © GrandPalaisRmn (musée de l’Orangerie)/Hervé Lewandowski
Claude Monet, The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil, 1872, National Gallery, London. © The National Gallery

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