GROWING UP IN LE HAVRE
  MuMa’s exhibition offers visitors a sensitive, in-depth overview of the years Claude Monet spent in Le Havre as a child and a young man, from 1845, when his family moved there five years after his birth, to 1874, the year when the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, and when he produced the last major series of seascapes he painted in the port of Le Havre. During those three decades, Monet experienced the awakening and increasing certainty of his artistic vocation.

It was in Le Havre that the young Monet took his first steps as an artist. He filled his sketchbooks with drawings from life, mischievously caricaturing prominent citizens, produced his first landscapes in the company of Eugène Boudin, then Johan Barthold Jongkind, absorbed the teachings of his masters and composed his first still lifes. As he oscillated between the city where he grew up and Paris, where he met the future Impressionists, his gaze was gradually formed and his ambition confirmed.

In Le Havre, he also encountered photographers, who had been lured there by the picturesque subjects it offered or the technical challenges presented by a fast-changing port city. Their pictures provided a pool of subjects that recur in his oeuvre. Be it the wild landscapes of the headland of La Hève in Sainte-Adresse, known locally as the “world’s end” and a favourite spot with the denizens of Le Havre, the regattas in which the roadstead teems with sailing boats, or the heart of the great industrial port, Monet’s Norman paintings recount the birth of a painter and of a modern way of seeing.


HIS FIRST SUPPORTERS
  It was also in Le Havre that Monet found his first supporters. Within his family, his brother Léon Monet encouraged him; among local collectors, the Gaudibert family bought his earliest pictures. Later on, founding members of the Cercle de l’Art moderne Olivier Senn, Pieter Van der Velde and Charles-Auguste Marande regularly purchased his work. Through his painter friends Eugène Boudin and Gustave Courbet, the young artist gained access to a wider circle of patrons and was able to carve out a place for himself on the art scene.

With the aid of hitherto unseen archival documents, the exhibition presents the artist’s family circle, Le Havre society and its decisive influence on Monet, the young painter’s sources of inspiration, his early training as an artist, his many caricatures, the places he chose to depict, how his technique developed and the vital role played by his first collectors. A detailed chronology, maps of the area and extracts from correspondence – many of them never previously displayed – will shed uniquely valuable light on the origins of an oeuvre and the career of an artist who was to change the course of the history of painting.


THE EXHIBITION ITINERARY
  MuMa’s exhibition will shed new light on the Monet family and Le Havre society with its local worthies, caricatured by the youthful artist, and numerous artistic influences. Its itinerary consists of the following ten sections, which will be organized thematically and chronologically and will feature approximately 100 items including Monet’s own paintings and sketchbooks, archival documents and numerous family photographs.




1. Growing up in Le Havre
2. Monet’s first sketchbooks (1856) and first painting (1858)
3. Monet and still life
4. Caricatures, Le Havre and Paris
5. Monet’s and Boudin’s pastels of skies
6. Gustave Le Gray and photographers in Le Havre in 1856
7. Maritime and port landscapes
8. Art patrons in Le Havre
9. Monet’s gift to the City of Le Havre, 1910
10. Water Lilies #1 and #2 by Ai Weiwei, 2022. 


AI WEIWEI, WATER LILIES #1 ET #2, 2022
A CONTEMPORARY GARDEN
  In conjunction with the 2026 edition of the Normandy Impressionist Festival, MuMa will be presenting two installations by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. This is the first time these monumental artworks – each of them is over fifteen metres long – have been shown in France. Made up of 650,000 LEGO® bricks, they revisit Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. During his years in New York, Ai Weiwei spent many hours contemplating the painting in MoMa, absorbing its shimmering reverberations.

From his memory of this arose an unusual reinterpretation, in which the industrial, serially produced coloured bricks are substituted for the Impressionist brushstrokes without losing the meditative impetus. Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies are also a filial gesture. They pay homage to the artist’s father, a poet who studied in Paris and was profoundly influenced by Impressionism, but was silenced by the communist regime when he went back to China.
  At MuMa, these two monumental artworks are presented at the beginning and end of the exhibit itinerary, in counterpoint with the 1904 Water Lilies given to the City of Le Havre by Monet in 1910. They also mark Ai Weiwei’s first visit to Normandy, following in Monet’s footsteps, setting this encounter between East and West and between past and present in the place where Impressionism was born..






 

---

Exhibit curated by
Géraldine Lefebvre, Director of MuMa
and Philippe Platel, Director of the Normandy Impressionist Festival.
 

---

►As part of the Normandy Impressionist Festival 2026

 


The exhibition “Monet in Le Havre” has benefited from exceptional support from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet, which have fully associated themselves with its development via loans of artworks and specialist input. It assembles artworks from leading institutions in France and other countries including the National Gallery in London, the National in Edinburgh and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Denver Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art, Ordrupgaard in Charlottenlund, near Copenhagen, and La Boverie in Liège, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama and Tochigi City Museum of Art in Japan, the Musées de Honfleur, the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In addition, Claude Monet’s descendants have consented to lend artworks that have never previously been displayed, such as the portrait of the artist’s father and one of his earliest sketchbooks, for the exhibition. 
 


►This exhibition is presented on the occasion of the 9th edition of Un Été Au Havre, a summer cultural season.