National Gallery Curator Talk – Monet

Thursday 23 May –

Dr Chris Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London 

Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’  

The longest lived of the key French Impressionist masters, Claude Monet (1840-1926) was every bit as radical and inventive a painter at the end of life as in fearless youth. In his final years his principal – indeed, obsessive – subject was the lower of two gardens at his country estate at Giverny west of Paris. It was dominated by an arching Japanese bridge over a pond of water-lilies. For decades he explored with unending pleasure the ever-changing light conditions, advancing and retreating foliage and myriad reflections on the pond. This is a key early work in the series, executed just before the turn of the 20th century. The talk explores the surprising richness of the theme, Monet’s use of scale and canvas shape to invest meaning, and his flirtation with painterly abstraction, so influential on later generations of painters. 

Christopher Riopelle is The Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London. He has held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, California, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and taught at the American College, Paris, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.  Recent exhibitions he has curated or co-curated include Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (Minneapolis and London, 2015-16), Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (Paris, London and Philadelphia, 2014-15), Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection (London, 2011), Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (London and Dublin, 2019), Gauguin Portraits (Ottawa and London, 2019-20) and Conversations with God: Matejko’s ‘Copernicus’ (2021). He is currently preparing the National Gallery’s major bicentenary exhibition Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers opening in September 2024.