Jun 7, 2024 - Things to Do

"Monet to Matisse" opens in Portland

Joseph Gallivan

Cart and oxen on beach — "The Beach at Trouville" by Eugène Louis Boudin. Photo: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

The big summer show at the Portland Art Museum opens Saturday, straddling that sweet spot in French art from Impressionism to Modernism.

What to expect: "Monet to Matisse: French Moderns" includes such works as Eugène Louis Boudin's "The Beach at Trouville," Jules Breton's "The End of the Working Day," Gustave Courbet's "The Wave" and Auguste Rodin's "Balzac in a Monk's Habit."

The big picture: This show of about 60 works draws on the Brooklyn Museum's European collection and has already traveled globally to places like Jeju, South Korea, and Padua, Italy.

Zoom in: Lloyd DeWitt, the new curator of European art at the Portland Art Museum, told Axios to look for Jean-Léon Gérôme's "The Carpet Merchant of Cairo," a neoclassical work from 1869 when Impressionism was already quite advanced.

The slick painting style gives an ethnographic view of a marketplace in Cairo.
DeWitt also singles out Berthe Morisot, a female Impressionist who painted female subjects in a non-idealized manner, as seen in "Madame Boursier and Her Daughter."

If you go: "Monet to Matisse: French Moderns" runs June 8-Sept. 15 ($25 adults, 17 and under free.)

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"Monet to Matisse" opens in Portland

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