Today the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) announced its program of exhibitions for 2021, including the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition French Impressionism: From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Melbourne is the only international destination for this major exhibition. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) is world renowned for the depth and breadth of its impressionist painting collection and the 2021 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition will feature more than 100 masterworks of French Impressionism, including paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte, and Mary Cassatt. Nearly 80 of the works on show are coming to Australia for the first time.

A highlight of the exhibition will be 16 paintings by Monet arranged in an immersive display reminiscent of the oval gallery he helped to design for his famous Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Monet’s paintings in French Impressionism depict many of the artist’s favourite locations, including Argenteuil, the Normandy coast, the Mediterranean coast, and his now famous garden in Giverny.

French Impressionism: From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will be a ticketed exhibition, 4 June to 3 October 2021. But visitors to NGV won’t have to wait until winter to see a major exhibition of home-grown impressionist works.

Opening 2 April, and running through to 22 August, She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism will present 270 artworks drawn from major public and private collections around Australia including the NGV collection. Iconic works by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E Phillips Fox will be shown alongside less well known pieces by Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory. She-Oak and Sunlight will place local impressionism in an international context by juxtaposing Australian artworks with paintings by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others from the NGV collection.

Other highlights from the 2021 NGV exhibition season include: Big Weather, 12 March – 6 February 2022, an exhibition that focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge of weather systems through historical and contemporary art; Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories, 11 June – 3 October, a major retrospective covering three decades of work by the Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung woman; Camille Henrot: Is Today Tomorrow, 18 June – 24 October, the first Australian survey show on the French born, New York-based contemporary artist; Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum, 25 June – 3 October, a showcase of more than 160 works on paper by Francisco Goya (1746–1828); Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey, 8 October – 20 February 2022, which finds parallels in the work of two very different artists; and Queer, 10 December – June 2022, an exploration of the NGV Collection through a queer lens.