Monet at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow holds an important group of paintings by Claude Monet, including one of the pictures shown at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. Its collection traces back to the extraordinary appetite of Russian collectors for French modern painting in the decades before the First World War.
Two collectors, one dispersal
Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov bought French art in Paris on a scale that startled even the dealers who sold to them. After 1917 their collections were nationalised, later brought together in the State Museum of New Western Art, and then divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage when that museum was closed in 1948. The Pushkin’s Monets are therefore part of one of the most consequential collecting stories in the history of Impressionism, and their presence in Moscow is the direct result of two men buying ahead of every museum in Europe.
Among the best known works are Boulevard des Capucines, painted in 1873 from Nadar’s studio window and shown in the founding Impressionist exhibition, and a version of Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe from 1866, an ambitious open-air figure composition made while Monet was still in his twenties. The collection also includes Rouen Cathedral and water lily subjects from his later serial campaigns. Every painting listed below can be commissioned as a hand-painted oil reproduction.
12 Monet works from Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
These paintings span the two poles of Monet's practice: the crowded, quick-eyed city picture and the slow, dissolving study of water and stone. That contrast is useful when choosing. Boulevard des Capucines and the figure paintings have narrative and movement, which makes them good company in a hallway or a room where people gather. The cathedral and pond subjects are contemplative, and work best where someone actually sits down. Warm greys, bare-tree browns and soft rose tones run through much of the group, so they pair easily with wood and with darker painted walls. Browse the wider collection.
Official collection: Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts