Imagine Paris in the 1860s. The Seine rippling in silver light, a perfume of damp earth and cigarette smoke curling through the air, and two young men—Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—side by side in the open air at La Grenouillère. Their brushes dance across canvas, feverishly chasing light that flickers and vanishes within seconds. They are not painting for posterity, nor for patronage, but for sensation, immediacy, truth. Every brushstroke is rebellion against the academy; every daub of colour, a manifesto. They do not yet know that their visions—grainstacks dissolving at dusk, poppy fields swaying in molten summer haze—will redefine how the world sees.
Claude Monet. Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny. 1885. Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 81.3 cm. Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Elsewhere in a dim Parisian studio, Edgar Degas bends not before the whims of nature but before the taut, aching lines of a ballerina. He presses wax and clay into form, constructing Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer with uncanny tenderness. She is no mythological muse but a living, breathing girl, immortalised in tutu, bodice, slippers and human hair. Viewers recoil and marvel in equal measure; Degas has drawn life out of artifice. His Paris is not light-drenched rivers, but rehearsal halls, racecourses, and boudoirs.
Together, Monet, Renoir, and Degas forged the pulse of French Impressionism, a movement that scandalised 19th-century critics with its loose brushstrokes and scandalously modern vision. Impressionism was never simply about painting pretty landscapes; it was about collapsing time into pigment, capturing the immediacy of life as lived—fleeting light on water, the tremor of tulle mid-pirouette, the shimmer of rain on cobblestones. And though their canvases were born in Paris, their ripples reached far beyond, touching cinema, photography, and even fashion. Dior’s chiffon, Chanel’s delicate tweeds, the very notion of light as luxury—all owe a debt to the Impressionist eye.
This November, Singapore becomes the stage for the grandest Impressionist encounter Southeast Asia has ever seen. National Gallery Singapore unveils Into the Modern: Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (14 November 2025 – 1 March 2026), an exhibition of more than 100 works travelling from one of America’s most revered collections. It is, quite simply, historic: the first time these masterpieces have crossed into the region, shimmering with all the romance of Paris’s Belle Époque.
Seventeen Monets take pride of place—grainstacks glowing like embers, poppy fields ablaze in scarlet, water and sky dissolving into one another as though time itself had melted on the canvas. Renoir’s radiant portraits hum with sensual warmth, while Degas brings his dancers to life in brush, bronze, and movement. The works are arranged in seven thematic chapters that unravel Impressionism’s dialogue with modernity: its fascination with cities and cafés, its intimacy with nature, its gaze upon women, its eternal question of how to paint the world as it is seen, not as it is staged.
Pierre Auguste Renoir. Woman with a Parasol and Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside. c. 1874–1876. Oil on canvas, 47 × 56.2 cm. Bequest of John T. Spaulding. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
And this is no passive pilgrimage of gazing. The Gallery promises interactive ARTelier zones, where visitors step into the Impressionists’ shoes, reflecting, sketching, and discovering the alchemy of colour. There is even a rare moving image of Monet himself, a ghost from history flickering in black and white—a moment where time collapses, and the artist who once captured fleeting light becomes fleeting light himself.
That this constellation of works arrives from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—a temple of art history founded in 1870 and home to one of the world’s most significant Impressionist holdings—only heightens the allure. And that Singapore, with its own flourishing identity as Asia’s cultural crucible, should host it, feels poetic. The city-state, a cosmopolitan hub where tradition collides with tomorrow, is the perfect echo of Impressionism’s own dialogue with modernity.
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. Carmen Gaudin in the Artist’s Studio. 1888. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 46.7 cm. Bequest of John T. Spaulding. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
For connoisseurs, students, and the culturally curious, this is not an exhibition—it is an initiation. To stand before a Monet is to feel the weight of the sun; to gaze upon a Degas is to hear the rustle of tulle; to meet Renoir’s subjects eye-to-eye is to feel intimacy across centuries. This is the closest Southeast Asia has ever come to Paris’s fevered art scene of the 19th century.
Admission is modest—$15 for Singaporeans, $25 for tourists—but the experience is priceless, unrepeatable. For a fleeting season, the masters of light and life will dwell here, and to miss them is to miss a chapter of art history itself.
Pierre Auguste Renoir. Dance at Bougival. 1883. Oil on canvas,181.9 × 98.1 cm. Picture Fund. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
So clear your calendars. Dress as though for an encounter. Step into the gallery not as a visitor but as a participant in history. Because when the light shifts, when the poppies blaze, when the dancer bows her head—it is Impressionism reminding us: life, like art, is always now.
For more information, please refer to the following annex or visit nationalgallery.sg/IntoTheModern
*Photos courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.