Monet

The MFA boasts one of the largest collections of the celebrated Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s work outside France. Gallery 252 is dedicated to Monet, providing an immersive experience of his work from the MFA’s holdings and select loans from private collectors. Visitors can engage with how Monet saw and captured the world—from watery reflections to his famed series paintings from the 1890s and beyond, and his innovative perspectives in landscape. The beauty and magic of nature come to life through his nuanced visions of light and atmosphere.

Monet returned time and again to his favorite motifs and locations, which often depict familiar sites near where he lived. Curving roads, grain stacks, and poplar trees feature throughout his long career, in early plein-air compositions like Entrance to the Village at Vétheuil in Winter (1879) and in Grainstack (Sunset) (1891).

  • Lorna and Robert Rosenberg Gallery (Gallery 252)

A Late-Career Masterpiece

A visitor engages with their smartphone in front of an ancient sculpture of a lion

Experience the bravura brushwork and vivid color of Monet’s late work in Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows (about 1916–19), a new highlight on loan from a private collection and featured in a fully reimagined gallery display. Made about a decade later than any other Monet painting in the MFA’s collection, this late example extends the chronology of Monet’s career on view, giving visitors a deeper and more expansive story of the artist and his work. The large-scale work is remarkable for its deep jewel-toned palette and expressive surface. It captures the emotive and encompassing power of Monet’s increasingly abstract compositions in the last decade of his career.

On view in Gallery 252

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