EDINBURGH.- The National Gallery of Scotland stages one of the most ambitious and significant exhibitions ever held in Edinburgh this August. Monet: the Seine and the Sea is the inaugural exhibition in the newly refurbished Royal Scottish Academy Building which is now owned and administered by the National Galleries of Scotland. This much-anticipated show will be the first to examine the period from 1878-1883, a phase of critical importance in Monet’s work. Some 90 paintings borrowed from major collections all over the world will be shown to coincide with the Edinburgh International Festival.  
The period around 1880 was the high tide of the Impressionist movement. A painting (Impression, Sunrise, 1873) by Claude Monet (1840-1926) had given a name to this new style of painting, and at forty Monet was at the peak of his career. The paintings he produced between 1878 and 1883 are some of his finest. This show, demonstrates an Impressionist master at the height of his powers.
In 1878 Monet moved from Argenteuil, close to Paris, to Vétheuil, a village on the River Seine near Vernon. The canvases Monet painted at Vétheuil formed a distinct break from the consciously modern subjects of his Argenteuil work, and show Monet reassessing himself as a painter of ‘pure’ landscape. His motifs include the village of Vétheuil and its dominant church, the curving tree-lined banks of the river, and the orchards and meadows on the hills above, painted with a characteristically virile and colourful touch throughout the changing seasons. They also include his famous group of canvases of the ice floes on the Seine, painted during the harsh winter of 1879-80.
In 1881 Monet began making regular extended visits to the Normandy coast, where he had worked as a young man. The paintings made there were a conscious contrast to those made at Vétheuil. They represent the great cliffs of Pourville and Varengeville towering over the beaches and offering sweeping views out over the Channel.
Between the autumn of 1878 and the spring of 1883 Monet produced some 350 pictures, his impressive output motivated to a great extent by rising debts and, initially, by concern over his wife’s health. Many of the landscapes painted at Vétheuil were rural idylls, lacking modern imagery and designed to appeal to a bourgeois, urban public seeking a vision of a timeless rural France. Nonetheless this was a significant period in Monet’s development as an artist, and the strikingly novel images he produced on the Normandy coast move beyond Impressionism, foreshadowing the ‘series’ paintings which he was to execute during his years at Giverny from 1883 onwards.
Monet’s personal life was also in a period of great change. The move from Paris provided the surroundings of a quiet village community for his ailing wife Camille, in poor health since the birth of their second son Michel earlier in 1878. Their home was shared with the family of Monet’s business associate Ernest Hoschedé, who also moved to Vétheuil with his wife Alice and their children. Given that for much of the time spent in Vétheuil Monet was first tending his stricken wife and then mourning her death, it is easy to suggest that he found solace in work. However, pressure to sell this work was mounting, as his commitments became greater. He now had two sons to care for and, with the death of Camille in 1879, an increasing responsibility for Alice Hoschedé and her children. Although Ernest Hoschedé had the primary duty there, this situation gradually shifted, with fewer and fewer visits by Ernest to his family. In 1890 Ernest died and two years later, Monet married Alice in a civil ceremony.
The exhibition will be divided into two main themes, contrasting motifs of rural Vétheuil with the sublime Normandy seascapes. A third element will add a fresh dimension to the monographic exhibition by adding a small selection of paintings by French landscape painters who Monet admired and who had died in the years immediately before his move to Vétheuil – among them Camille Corot (1796-1875), Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878). This is to suggest Monet, the competitive artist, recasting the previous generation’s motifs in his own individual Impressionist style.
With 90 of the approximately 350 paintings executed between 1878 and 1883 - thus almost a quarter of Monet’s output during this period – Monet: the Seine and the Sea will provide the most intense examination ever staged of Monet’s production over a short time.
Sir George Mathewson, Chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, commented on the bank’s sponsorship of the exhibition:
"The Royal Bank of Scotland is proud to be sponsoring an exhibition of this stature in what is now one of the finest art galleries in the world. Monet: The Seine and the Sea promises to be one of the most popular exhibitions of the decade and we are pleased that our support has enabled so many of the finest paintings from this period of Monet’s life to be seen by so many people throughout the UK and, indeed, the world."
The National Galleries of Scotland will be publishing a fully illustrated catalogue, Monet: the Seine and the Sea (priced £17.95), written by the show’s curators, Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, and Professor Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh. There will also be a souvenir guide to the exhibition, Monet: Paintings of the Seine and the Sea (priced £4.95), by Frances Fowle.