Thursday, October 10, 6 – 7pm
Claude Monet. The Studio Boat (detail), 1876. The Barnes Foundation, BF730. Public Domain.
On-site $10; online $8; members and students free
About the Talk
André Dombrowski | “Painting on Water: Monet between Giverny and Venice”
Claude Monet was the consummate painter of water. In many of his works, reflections on rivers and ripples on ponds offer permanent views of an evanescent visual world. At times, Monet painted such views from the water itself, working from studio boats, small ships, or Venetian gondolas. In this talk, André Dombrowski will consider the embodied experience of painting such a transitory surface from unstable vantage points. At the same time, we will consider deeper questions raised by Monet’s impressionism concerning the nature of reality and how we experience time.
This lecture is part of our Impressionism at the Barnes series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. Each talk highlights an impressionist (or neo-impressionist) artist in the Barnes collection, detailing their importance in the history of modern art and uncovering what made their work so radical to 19th-century audiences. Don’t miss Michelle Foa on Seurat at the Barnes and Martha Lucy on Renoir’s La Source.
About the Speaker
André Dombrowski
Dombrowski is Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th-Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His 2013 book, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, won the Phillips Book Prize, and his newest book Monet's Minutes (Yale University Press, 2023) explores the relationship between the impressionist instant and period technologies of timekeeping.
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