In the wake of the armistice in 1918, Monet gave his Water Lilies to France. Panoramas of battlefields and war fronts were popular; Monet offered a water garden instead. The donation consists of eight massive, multi-paneled mural canvases (spanning roughly 91 to 100 linear meters total) designed to envelop the viewer in a continuous landscape of water, light, and reflections. As a viewer these days, you are more likely to be enveloped by layers of tourists – such as yourself – posing and taking selfies. But they remain extraordinary, mesmerising, and magnificent.
The works are permanently housed in custom-built, natural-light oval rooms designed to Monet’s specifications at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
A century after Claude Monet’s death, the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris honors him with Stories of Landscapes From Monet to Hockney (1890-2026) – an exhibition on the role of landscape in art and how it is represented.
The exhibition leads visitors through eleven thematic stations and shows landscape through the eyes of 69 artists. It also takes in what has vanished. Landscape, the show suggests, is never neutral: it absorbs what happens in it, or conceals it.
One example is Johanna Quillet’s sun-drenched forest, which reads as peaceful until the title reveals it to be the site of Sobibor, the Reinhard extermination camp, erased by human design and by nature.
MARMOTTAN MONET MUSEUM
From September 24, 2026 to January 31, 2027
Featured image: Claude Monet, Le matin clair aux saules [Clear Morning with Willows] (detail).