Monet and Japan: An Exhibition Organised by the National Gallery of Australia

Monet never traveled to Japan, but he surrounded himself with a large collection of Japanese woodblock prints. Like a number of other Parisians, he first collected Japanese prints in the 1860s. He shared the European view of Japanese culture as supremely artistic, shaped by the refined aesthetic tastes of its people, in harmony with its legendary beauty. As early as the 1870s, critics were writing about the influence of Japanese art on Monet's Impression. Monet and Japan shows how Japanese prints and paintings helped to shape Monet's art during six decades, influencing not only his style and subject matter, but the very way he saw the world around him. It includes Japanese prints and paintings that we know Monet saw, or could have seen, or works very like them. The book also contains Monet's paintings of his pays, that part of France which he knew best, where he was born and brought up--the Seine Valley from Le Havre on the Norman coast to Paris. It is in his paintings of the landscapes that he knew intimately that one can best observe how Monet used Japanese art to shape his vision of his world.