WEST PALM BEACH, FL.-This exceptional exhibition featuring fifty-three masterworks from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston explores the influence of the French Impressionist painters on Boston’s artists and collectors during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of the fifty-three paintings, twelve are by Monet, spanning the artist’s mature career from his days in Argenteuil to his later work at Giverny, including Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden at Argenteuil, 1875, Meadow with Haystacks near Giverny, circa 1875 and Waterlilies, 1905. Other notable French artists include Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Their work will be shown alongside American artists such as Childe Hassam, William Morris Hunt, John Singer Sargent and Edmund Charles Tarbell.

The exhibition will make its American debut at the Norton Museum of Art on November 19, 2005 where it will be on view through March 6, 2006. Advance tickets are available at the Museum’s box office, telephone 561-832-5196, or via the Museum's web site, www.norton.org. The exhibition was previously seen in Nagoya, Japan, and the Royal Academy, London.

Dr. Christina Orr-Cahall, Director of the Norton Museum of Art, comments, "We are delighted to have been selected as the only U.S. venue for this magnificent exhibition. It will be the first time that visitors to the Museum will be able to see the juxtaposition of masterpieces by Monet, Degas, Manet, and others with major works by American Impressionists such as Hassam and Sargent. The importance of these artists cannot be underestimated and the relationship between Impressionism in France and its imprint on the Boston artists and collectors is highly visible."

Eloquently surveying the development of Impressionism in both France and America, French Impressionism and Boston will tell the fascinating story of how the latest and most advanced examples of French art came to be collected by eager Bostonians during the second half of the nineteenth century.

During this time period, Boston was home to some of the best-informed and most progressive collectors of modern painting in the United States. These collectors were among the first to embrace the successive waves of stylistic innovation occurring in France, and the most avid collectors of modern French art. Not surprisingly, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) was the first American museum to organize a Monet retrospective (in 1911) and to purchase a work by Edgar Degas, Race Horses at Longchamps, 1871, which is included in this exhibition.