Monet to Matisse: Masterworks of French Impressionism

Monet to Matisse: Masterworks of French Impressionism from the Dixon Gallery and Gardens is an expansive view of nineteenth-century French painting and its influences. It is a story of artistic freedom and the shift from stilted academic historicism to near abstraction.

In 1874, a group of young painters—including Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir—organized an exhibition independent of the official French Salon, which did not approve of their new style. Called “Impressionists” because their paintings appeared to capture a fleeting vision of light on a subject rather than the thing itself, the artists often worked en plein air, or out of doors. Their work was characterized by quick brushwork and unblended paint applied directly to the canvas, creating shape and volume through the contrast of colors. The works in the exhibition are not only beautiful but also historically significant, with some of the canvases first seen in the original Impressionist shows of the 1870s and 1880s in Paris.

Monet to Matisse features 30 paintings from the renowned collection of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. The exhibition includes landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes by leaders of French Impressionism: Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, as well as work by noted Americans Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent. Major paintings by Post-Impressionist artists Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, and Georges Braque complete the exhibition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website