Yesterday was fabulous: I finally made it to the Musee Marmottan, which features the largest Monet collection in the world. Next weekend, my program has a day trip to Rouen and Giverny, where Monet's gardens are, so I wanted to see the museum before going on the trip!
The museum was absolutely incredible and once again I so appreciated being physically in front of the actual painting rather than looking at a picture in a book! The abstractness of the works stuck out to me much more in person than in photos, and I could totally see how abstract art developed post-Impressionism. I especially love the variation on the sky in all of the paintings, even though it is not a focal point in most of the works, I couldn't stop looking at it.
I also got very excited while I was there because on one of the paintings, underneath his signature, Monet wrote "Belle Isle" aka (almost) my last name!
Here's a few of my favorites...
"La Barque" (The rowboat)
"Nympheas" (water lilies, too hard to pick an exact favorite out of all of them!)
"Le Pont Japonais" (Japanese Bridge)
Now I can't wait to go to Giverny, as well as to the Orangerie museum here in Paris, which has the Monet's very famous giant water lily paintings that take up the entire room.
In other exciting news, today I booked train tickets for a weekend in the south of France in May! It is over one of our three day weekends, and a few of us have also taken the liberty to decide that Monday will also be a day off. We will be hitting Nice, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, and Aix-en-Provence in a whirlwind weekend of (hopefully) sun and sand! I can't wait.
