It may surprise lovers of Impressionism in the U.S. and Britain that Claude Monet, the artist whose name most hold synonymous with Impressionism, doesn’t evoke the same level of reverence in his native France. Not that he isn’t popular; the French just seem a bit more blasé about their cornucopia of Impressionist works and the nominal star of the group.

A new exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris seeks to change that, if by no other means than overwhelming visitors with the sheer number of Monet’s stunning works collected in a single place.

Over 200 of his paintings have been collected from museums in France and around the world, in an exhibition that spans Monet’s career from the early realism of the 1860’s to the fiery Impressionist canvasses of the 1920’s.

The Grand Palais’s own website has always been essentially useless in seeking information about exhibitions there, which are usually mounted by other institutions. The Musée d’Orsay, co-sponsor of the exhibition, also has little to offer.

On digging further, I found that the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the other co-sponsor, has the in depth information about the exhibit.

Jackpot.

If you’re a regular reader of Lines and Colors, you may have heard me gripe about the relative lack of high-resolution art images on the web, frustrated with the small teaser images most sites seem to find sufficient.

The website for Exhibition Monet 2010 (English version here) is a bounty of zoomable high-resolution images of works from the exhibition.

You have to be willing to wait through a somewhat slow-loading Flash interface, but in the Gallery you will find beautiful images of Monet’s work, in most cases two or three times common screen resolution.

The gallery is arranged chronologically. Click on an individual image, or click on “All the Paintings” at left to start at the earliest, and you can move through them in order.

Be sure to click on the images themselves to zoom to the larger version (linked for most though not quite all of the paintings). Do yourself the favor of clicking the plus sign to bring the view all the way up to 100% to see the images in proper focus (they are slightly blurry in lower resolutions), and you will be rewarded with images of Monet’s work in which you can see the texture of the individual brushstrokes.

If you are interested enough in Monet to view all of the paintings, be prepared for a major time sink. I don’t know if all 200 or so paintings from the exhibition are included in the online gallery, but they may well be.

It’s wonderful to tour through Monet’s 60 year career, watch his approach evolve and change, and in particular, to see several of the famous series, the haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Houses of Parliment, and of course the water lilies, in which he repeatedly painted the same subject at different times in different light.

For those who live near Paris, or can travel there (sigh), the exhibition runs until 24 January, 2011.

You may want to book your tickets early, by all accounts the exhibition is fulfilling its role in generating the kind of enthusiasm for Monet in France that he has enjoyed in the the U.S. and Britain for the last 100 years.

Even if you think you know Monet, this exhibition, and its online version, may reveal him anew; perhaps allowing you to begin to see through the Impressionist master’s remarkable eyes.

Cezanne reportedly said of him: “Monet is just an eye — but God, what an eye!”

Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth is an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY that features some prime examples of American landscape painting from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The exhibit explores the fascination artists have had with the glories of the American landscape in Autumn, described by Thomas Cole as quoted on the site:

There is one season when the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness, that is the autumnal; — then every hill and dale is riant in the luxury of color — every hue is there, from the liveliest green to deepest purple from the most — golden yellow to the intensest crimson.

The online exhibit page lists several of the works, each one in the list linked to an image and descriptive text.

Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth is on display until January 16, 2011.

(Images above: N.C. Wyeth, Robert Reid, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Worthington Whittredge)

Though considered a member of the original core group of French Impressionists, Edgar Degas (Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas), always stood apart, both in his approach to painting, in which he considered himself a realist rather than an Impressionist, and in his emphasis on drawing.

Amid a group that downplayed the role of drawing in art in deference to the immediacy of painting the fleeting effects of light (Monet went so far as to hide the role drawing played in his art), Degas was arguably one of the finest draftsmen of the 19th Century.

Degas was part of the Impressionist group socially, and hung out at the Café Guerbois with artists in and around their circle, including Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Bazille and Pissarro, though he often argued with them.

He helped organize the Impressionists’ out-of-the-mainstream independent exhibits, and exhibited in all but one of them. More financially stable then the others, he also collected works by painters in and around their circle, like Pissarro, Gauguin, Cézanne and Manet.

In his painting style, however, he never adopted the broken dots of color, painting of light effects or fondness for landscape championed by Monet and the other Impressionists, and was derisive of their practice of plein air painting.

He instead continued in the vein of the realists like Courbet and Corot (who, we forget today, were radical in their own time). Degas, too was radical in his own way, particularly in his dramatic compositions, which broke the laws of academic painting as surely as his contemporaries did with their deliberate rejection of academic traditions.

Like the Impressionists, Degas was very influenced by the work of Édouard Manet, who he met while both were copying the same painting in the Louvre (a practice common to serious art students at the time), but Degas also carried with him his admiration for artists like Ingres and Delacroix.

Degas, particularly in his later work, did share with the Impressionists the use of bold, painterly brushwork and vivid colors; and this, as well as his compositional innovations, carried over into his intensely expressive pastel drawings, which may be the most recognizable of his works today.

With their familiar subjects of ballet rehearsals, horse racing and women at the bath, Degas’ pastels are beautifully drawn, innovatively realized and striking in their graphic power.

Degas also drew beautifully in other media, and was accomplished at etching, lithography and sculpture.

There is currently an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York of Degas Drawings and Sketchbooks that is on display until January 23, 2011. The Online Exhibition on the website lets you flip through a selection of drawings and a sketchbook from the exhibit. Use the “See thumbnails” choice at left and when using the Zoomable views, be sure to choose the “Full Screen” option below the image to the right of the zooming controls.

Degas has become one of the most popular and revered artists in the world, and there are more resources in print and on the web than I can begin to list here; so I will instead point you to a general search on Amazon for Degas, and the extensive lists of web resources for Degas on ArtCyclopedia, including museum listings and image archives (see the tabs at the top of the list for other categories).