Monet in Normandy was the first scholarly exhibition to celebrate the intimate relationship between Claude Monet and his native landscape. Although born in Paris, Monet moved with his family to Le Havre, a charming town on the Normandy coast, when he was a small child, thus beginning the artist's enduring relationship with the region.
The rugged coast, shingled beaches, stunning cliffs, and the countryside with abundant wheat and poppy fields and picturesque villages populated his paintings throughout his career. The drama of the coast provided subject matter for several of Monet's most significant early works of the 1860s. In several deeply personal canvases of 1870, Monet recorded his honeymoon in the Norman seaside resort town, Trouville, with his new wife, Camille. Throughout the 1880s, while living in a suburb of Paris, Monet made numerous painting campaigns to the Normandy coast. The spectacle of the cliffs and sea exposed to the elements became the artist's most frequent subject matter of the period. Monet spent the last 30 years of his life in Giverny, a picturesque village on the eastern border of Normandy. The misty Seine, lush fields, and the artist's abundant gardens and water lily pond comprised the subject matter of his late paintings.
The exhibition was organized geographically, beginning with Monet's earliest depictions of the resort town, Sainte-Adresse, located on the Norman Coast overlooking the English Channel. The exhibition also included increasingly abstract, atmospheric descriptions of sea and sky painted from the town of Fécamp; views of the cliffs of Pourville; and several paintings of the fishermen's tiny church of Varengeville. Monet's views of the famous rock formations of tretat were featured in the exhibition, along with examples from Monet's famous series paintings—the Grain Stacks, Poplars, and Rouen Cathedral—all done in Normandy in the 1890s. Monet's late views of his garden at Giverny brought the exhibition to a conclusion.