Following the huge successes of Ron Mueck and Bank of Scotland totalART Andy Warhol, this year’s festival exhibition at the National Gallery Complex will be Impressionism & Scotland. This massive show features world-class art by the great Impressionists and the Scots they inspired.
The exhibition of about 100 paintings, and a few works on paper, will explore the Scottish taste for Impressionism at the turn of the twentieth century and the impact of European modernism on Scottish artists. Represented in the show will be Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Whistler, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse, as well as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.
This exhibition will highlight some astonishing parallels between the work of Dutch, French and Scottish artists, whose work will be hung side by side: Corot and Walton; Bastien-Lepage and Guthrie; Whistler and Lavery; Degas and Crawhall; Manet and Fergusson; Cézanne and Peploe; Matisse and Hunter. It will demonstrate that, despite these influences, both at home and abroad, Scottish artists developed their own instinctive brand of Impressionism, quite unlike the more analytical approach of the French Impressionists.
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Highlights
Poplars on the Epte, Claude Monet
1891
NG 1651
The elegant poplar trees on the banks of the River Epte, seen against a patchy blue summer sky, fuse with their reflected image in a network of brightly coloured brushstrokes. This is a work from Monet's celebrated series of poplar paintings made between the spring and autumn of 1891, the year after he had settled in Giverny. He used a boat as a floating studio and captured beautifully the shimmering effects of sunlight on water. The trees were ready to be sold for timber, but Monet, in partnership with a timber merchant, bought the trees at auction so that he could continue painting them.
- Material: Oil on canvas
- Size: 81.80 x 81.30 cm
- Location: National Galleries of Scotland
