From 4th June to 26th September 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des Beaux-Arts) in Rouen, is home to the largest collection of impressionist art outside Paris, is presenting some one hundred masterpieces by the greatest impressionist masters, dedicated to Rouen, the “City of a hundred towers”. The exhibition brings together an exceptional display of works from public and private collections the world over, including several that have never been shown in France. Over 130 pictures by the great painters of the late nineteenth century, with Monet, Gauguin and Pissarro at their head, will be shown together, for visitors to explore one of the last great themes of the history of Impressionism that has not yet been the subject of an exhibition: the role played by the Rouen, capital of Normandy in this artistic revolution. Rouen at the end of the nineteenth century, the city of a hundred towers, proves itself to have multiple faces: industrious and picturesque, avant-garde yet wary of following the new aesthetics of Impressionism. Rouen at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was a laboratory of experiments, where abundant artistic encounters and exchanges occurred, Rouen is a city where the Impressionists were able to take up the position that was rightfully theirs.
