A Masterpiece Returns: Traveling Monet
By Emily Gold Boutilier
![View of "Morning on the Seine, Giverny" in gallery at the Mead.](/system/files/media/Amh-16612-sp15_x665.jpg)
An exhibition reunited Morning on the Seine, Giverny with other paintings from the same series.
[Art] Amherst’s Monet is back at the Mead Art Museum after a yearlong getaway to Oklahoma and Texas.
Morning on the Seine, Giverny was part of the exhibition Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
This exhibition focused on the painter’s Mornings on the Seine series, a group of 28 paintings exhibited together only once—by Monet himself in 1898. The Philbrook and MFA Houston brought together a selection of the 28 from around the world.
Morning on the Seine, Giverny is in the Mead’s permanent collection, a 1966 bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss. Charles Morgan, the first Mead director, writes in his memoir of visiting Bliss at her house: She asked, “Would you like a Monet?” and showed him to an upstairs bedroom so drenched in sun that he could see little more of the painting than the frame. When the oil-on-canvas first arrived at the Mead, Morgan was staggered to have received such an important work of art—part of the series that immediately preceded and influenced the famous Water Lilies.
!["Morning on the Seine, Giverny"](/system/files/media/Amh-16613-sp15_x665.jpg)
The Mead’s Monet is well-traveled. Five years ago the museum’s then-director, Elizabeth Barker, escorted it to a show at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. From there it traveled to Paris for a Monet retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay.