The Museo degli Innocenti in Florence hosts seventy works to showcase the connection between the Impressionists and Normandy
The celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the birth of the Impressionist movement in 1874, Florence’s Museo degli Innocenti is hosting a special exhibition of Impressionist masters until May 2025.
Leave it to this beautifully curated museum to not only bring together the works of master painters like Monet, Renoir, Delacroix and Courbet, but to place them firmly in the context of the landscape of Normandy which shaped the movement, offering viewers a new way to appreciate these favorites. As always, the Innocenti’s special attention to interactive and explanatory elements of the works themselves enriches the viewer’s experience.
In April of 1874 a group of artists, rejected by the mainstream and mainly ignored, pulled together a makeshift exhibition to showcase a new artistic style. Unlike the public art promulgated by the Salon des Artistes that favored classical subjects and large scale, studio-based projects, these artists, (among them Monet, Manet, Rnoir, Pissarro, and Sisle), displayed small-scale landscape works that had been painted en plen air They used small vivid and visible brush strokes and focused their attention on the accurate depiction of natural light and its affect on color.
While at the time they were ridiculed for their “impressions,” (a name given scathingly by the critic Louis LeRoy) the result, as we know, was revolutionary in the history of art. Iole Siena, president of the Arthemisia Group says it best in her introduction to the exhibition: “As often happens in the history of humanity, great revolutions begin in indifference, but then destiny takes its course and it is an inevitable one.”
The exhibition displays 70 works of art gathered from the Peindre en Normandie Collection, private collections, and the Le Havre Museum giving visitors an opportunity to see a truly unique collection of pieces. They are divided into five sections: The Saint-Siméon Farm, By the Sea: Leisure and Vacation, By the Sea: Work Life, The Land of Normandy and Along the Seine. Each section is accompanied by information, both written and in video to help viewers understand the history of impressionism, the cultural context in which it was born and its impact as well as detailed explanations of individual artists. Highlights include Delacroix’s “Cliffs at Dieppe,” Courbet’s “Beach at Trouville,” Renoir’s “Sunset,” “View of Guernsey” and Monet’s “Pink Waterlilies,” and “Fécamp, Seaside.”
One of the things that always makes the Innocenti exhibitions stand out for me are the interactive and experimental aspects scattered throughout. Along the route, you’ll find mini crash courses in understanding the materials the impressionists used, color theory, and light effects. Compare the difference between morning and afternoon light on a painting or how light refracts on ripples to start to see the world through the eyes of the painters. A display of tin tubes and paint brushes not only gives you a behind the scenes look at the tools impressionist painters used, but the innovation that allowed them to paint en plein air in the first place, by carrying just. a small bag of portable paints into a field or to the seaside – something that was previously impossible. Touch the canvas materials and compare them to the respective paintings that used them to see how certain effects were not achieved by mere paint alone but by the surface on which they were executed. Do your own subtractive and additive colour mixing with swiveling transparent panels to understand the depth of study behind these seemingly effortless works.
Throughout the exhibition the focus on Normandy is never far away, both in the subject matter and through the maps that center these now famous paintings in the landscapes that inspired them. There is even the customary yet always entrancing mirror tunnel that allows you to literally walk over the waves and into the projected landscape itself. The impressionists looked at their world in a new way, paying attention to how to capture, light, color, motion and ultimately place itself. By the time you leave this exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti, I promise, you’ll be doing the same.
Museo degli Innocenti
P.za della SS. Annunziata, 13
Until 4 May 2025
Hours: Open every day: 9:30am- 7:00pm
Ticket: Open €18, €16 full, €14 reduced
