Monet in New York

If you are not able to travel to Giverny, France to experience the world famous gardens of Claude Monet, you can visit New York. In the Bronx over the next several months, the New York Botanical Garden will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.



The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.

In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.

Claude Monet, artist and avid gardener, lead the Impressionist movement and revolutionized painting in the 1870s.

The story is that Claude Monet noticed the village of Giverny while looking out of a train window. He made up his mind to move there and rented a house and the area surrounding it. In 1890 he had enough money to buy the house and land outright and set out to create the magnificent gardens he wanted to paint.

Talk about the power of imagination!

Portraits

Did you know that all art galleries in the United Kingdom are FREE!?

Are you a fan of portrait art?

One of the most prestigious competitions of it's kind in the world in the category of portraiture is held annually at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Shaun Downey's painting, "Blue Coco" was one of 58 paintings selected from a record 2,177 International entries . His painting was also chosen as the main image of the ad campaign for the exhibition, featured on posters around the UK, the exhibition catalogue, and a banner draping the front of the National Portrait Gallery.

"Blue Coco"
Shaun Downey
oil on canvas
17 x 20 inches
BP Portrait Award 2010

In this fun video, the Toronto based artist Shaun Downey visits the BP Portrait Award 2010 competition, and gives an excellent explanation from an artist's perspective on the other portraits in the exhibition.

Have You Been To An Art Museum Lately?

When was the last time you visiting an Art Museum or Gallery?

Art Museums and Galleries are ranked according to the number of visitors. This popularity contest seems to designated the best art museums.

How many of these have you been to?


The top art galleries and museums in 2009, based on their annual visitor numbers are as follows.

1. 8,500,000 Louvre Paris
2. 5,569,981 British Museum, London
3. 4,891,450 Metropolitan Museum of Art
4. 4,780,030 National Gallery, London
5. 4,747,537 Tate Modern, London
6. 4,605,606 National Gallery of Art, Washington
7. 3,530,000 Centre Pompidou, Paris
8. 3,022,012 Musée d'Orsay, Paris
9. 2,763,094 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
10. 2,730,204 National Museum of Korea, Seoul
11. 2,672,761 Museum of Modern Art, New York
12. 2,574,804 Taiwan Palace Museum, Taiwan
13. 2,426,203 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
14. 2,273,634 Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
15. 2,269,900 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
16. 2,087,415 Reina Sofía, Madrid
17. 1,961,843 National Portrait Gallery, London
18. 1,846,889 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
19. 1,840,812 De Young Museum, San Francisco
20. 1,572,171 Moscow Kremlin Museum, Moscow
21. 1,530,318 Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
22. 1,513,249 National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
23. 1,501,837 Tate Britain, London
24. 1,500,000 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
25. 1,496,438 Musée Quai Branly, Paris
26. 1,451,139 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
27. 1,368,096 Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow
28. 1,312,762 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
29. 1,300,000 Children's Museum, Indianopolis
30. 1,283,401 State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I have been to five of these; Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay, Museum of Modern Art, and the De Young Museum. Looks like London would be a great place to travel inorder to view good art.

If you are interested in more statistics, including which art exhibits were most popular, you can find more information from The Art Newspaper's annual review of art galleries and museums and the exhibitions held around the world in 2009.