Image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet peignant dans son jardin à Argenteuil (détail), 1873. © Wadsworth Atheneum
The musée des impressionnismes Giverny will host a lecture on Claude Monet's work of the 1870s on October 29, 2026. Titled "Les années 1870 : Monet impressionniste", the talk will be given by Anne Robbins, curator in the Paintings department of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, in the museum's auditorium from 6 to 7pm. It is intended for adults. Admission is free, but registration through the museum's online form is required and places are limited.
The lecture starts from the Orsay collection. According to the museum, the Musée d'Orsay holds 76 paintings by Monet, and nearly half of them date from the 1870s. Robbins will set out why that decade is so strongly represented and follow the painter's development as he worked in London, Argenteuil and Vétheuil, often in the open air. The museum describes the period as one in which Monet renewed his art within Impressionism.
The talk is part of "À la recherche de Monet – Les conférences du centenaire", a lecture cycle organized for the Monet centenary by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, the MuMa – Musée d'art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Giverny museum. In each session, a curator from one of the partner institutions takes up a key decade of Monet's life and presents a work or a lesser-known aspect of his art or biography. The Musée d'Orsay's programme lists an earlier session in the cycle: on October 20, Géraldine Lefebvre, director of the MuMa in Le Havre, spoke in Paris on "Monet au Havre", covering the years from the Monet family's move to Le Havre in 1845 to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
The event page is illustrated with a detail of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1873 painting of Monet at work in his garden at Argenteuil, from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum.
