Temporary displays. Impressionist cycle (1874-2024)

As Edouard Manet's Le Balcon joins the musée d'Orsay, the hanging around the pre, para and post-impressionist collections of the museum of Fine Arts continues until October 28 in the Bonheur wing around Claude Monet's La Cabane des douaniers.

On 15 April 1874, 31 artists, including the renowned figures Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Sisley and Pissarro, decided to shake off academic conventions by holding their own exhibition outside of the official Salon, in photographer Nadar’s studio on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. This initial exhibition, which was followed by 7 others up to 1886, announced the emergence of the 20th century’s avant-garde artists.

To join in the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition and thus the birth of the movement, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux presents two masterpieces on exceptional loan from the Musée d’Orsay: Le Balcon by Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and La Cabane des Douaniers by Claude Monet (1840-1926).

Édouard Manet, Le Balcon, between 1868 and 1869, musée d’Orsay.
© Photo:F. Deval.

The presence of these two special guests offers an opportunity to showcase the Museum’s pre-impressionism to post-impressionism collections, around Jean-Baptiste Corot and the Barbizon school (Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Charles-François Daubigny, Henri Harpignies), Eugène Boudin and his Port de Bordeaux (1874) echoing Monet’s emblematic Impression, Sunrise (Marmottan-Monet Museum, Paris), Georges Seurat, John Lewis Brown, Louis Tauzin, Alfred Roll,  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Bordeaux-based artists Alfred Smith et Clémentine-Hélène Dufau,  Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot (the model for Le Balcon) and Mary Cassatt.

Claude Monet, La Cabane des douaniers. Effet d'après-midi, 1882. © Musée d’Orsay.

Eugène Boudin, Bordeaux. Le voilier blanc. Effet du soir, 1874. © MusBA.