Lord of reality, Master of Water Lilies. Opening 18 September 2021, Claude Monet inaugurates Milan’s Palazzo Reale autumn season with fifty-three paintings including Houses of Parliament, Reflections on the Thames (1905), The Roses (1925-26), The Walk near Argenteuil (1875) and the painter’s beloved and very famous Water Lilies.

An intimate, reserved display outlining a personal narrative with pictures that were jealously kept in the artist’s house in Giverny. Conceptualised and curated by Marianne Mathieu, art historian and scientific director of Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, this exhibition revolves around the power of colour in the work of the French master. Joy, sorrow, marvel, and dreamlike atmospheres: every work reveals nature’s mutability, the libertarian action of light, and the expressive force of Monet’s subjects that for the artist were a merely incidental aspect of his practice. As he often affirmed, his art was in fact essentially about capturing that which existed “between his subjects and himself”.

The exhibition will welcome art enthusiasts until 30 January 2022. “Everyone discusses my art and claims to understand it, as if there were something to be understood, when all it takes is love”. Claude Monet

Opening image: Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1916-1919. © Musée Marmottan Monet, Académie des beaux-arts, Paris