The Monet show you must not miss

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak, writing for The Sunday Times, said there would never be a better Monet exhibition in his lifetime. The Telegraph predicted that the show would break all records for visitor numbers (83,000 advance tickets were sold – twice as many as for Picasso and the Masters, which eventually pulled in 780,000 visitors). And The New York Times described the collection as 'ravishing'. 

Despite the odd 'dud' (Januszczak: 'because he is so ambitious, he remains, throughout his career, eminently capable of failure') and the refusal of the Musée Marmottan Monet - home to the largest collections of Monets in the world - to lend a selection of its works, Claude Monet 1840-1926 looks set to be the unmissable Monet exhibition of the era. 

Almost 200 works are gathered under the iron, glass and steel barrel-vaulted roof of the Grand Palais. Together they span a sixty year career of astonishing proliferation and imagination. Punctuated by familiar landmarks such as his series on trains at the Gare St-Lazare and the Cathedral at Rouen, and ending with the eight huge water lily paintings finished just before his death (housed in the Musée de l'Orangerie), the exhibition also offers the chance to disseminate new research on little-known aspects of his work, explored in the thirty year period since the last major Monet retrospective - also at the Galeries Nationales -took place in 1980. 

And, as if the fact that this is the most comprehensive overview of one of the most famous painters in history were not enough, the reality that they are unlikely to come together in such a way for decades should persuade even the most laclustre philhistine through the door: as well as bringing together multiple works on the same subject, many from private collections, the curators have also managed to obtain such 'historic unborrowables' as the Metropolitan Museum's Terrace at Sainte-Adresse.