Image: MuMa Museum of modern art André Malraux, Le Havre
Géraldine Lefebvre, director of Le Havre’s Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux, will deliver a free conference on Claude Monet’s formative years in Le Havre at the Musée des impressionnismes Giverny on 17 September 2026. Running from 18:00 to 19:00, ‘Monet au Havre’ is part of ‘À la recherche de Monet’, a centenary conference cycle marking 100 years since Monet’s death in 1926.
Lefebvre’s talk will review recent research and discoveries concerning the period from 1845, when Monet’s family settled in Le Havre, to 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. The three decades are presented as those in which the artist’s vocation emerged.
The conference will examine the range of work undertaken by the young Monet in Le Havre: drawing outdoors, experimenting with pastel, producing caricatures and composing still lifes. It will also address his discovery of landscape painting through Eugène Boudin. The talk will connect Monet’s early works to locations ranging from the cliffs of Pointe de la Hève to the port basins.
Unpublished archives, correspondence and photographs will inform an account of Monet’s family context, support networks and formative influences. His brother Léon and the Gaudibert family are among the figures named in the conference’s research focus.
‘À la recherche de Monet’ brings together the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, MuMa in Le Havre, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Musée des impressionnismes Giverny. Curators from the partner museums will focus on a decisive decade, a work or a lesser-known aspect of Monet’s life and art. Registration is required for ‘Monet au Havre’, subject to available places.
