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It’s hard to believe that Tate Modern has been open for 26 years and has never once hosted a solo exhibition dedicated to Claude Monet. But that is finally about to change – in a big way. The gallery has just locked in the full details for a massive show featuring 60 paintings to mark 100 years since the artist’s death, and it’ll be the UK’s biggest presentation of his work in nearly a decade.
Back in March, Tate revealed its full 2027 programme with the Monet show already confirmed at the top of the bill. Now, with an opening date locked in and full details released, we finally know what the gallery’s got planned. Standard ticket prices haven’t been confirmed yet, but it’s already known that entry will be free for Tate Members, and anyone aged 16-25 can get in for £5 by joining Tate Collective.
Monet: Painting Time opens on February 25 2027 and runs until June 27, covering everything from his early 1870s pieces right through to his final works in the 1920s. Instead of a chronological trudge through his life, the show focuses on Monet’s fixation with freezing fleeting moments in time and how that obsession went into overdrive as the modern world started speeding up around him.
Monet was painting during the rise of the railways, right when the invention of standardised time zones was changing daily life for the very first time. The show looks at how he captured this new world, moving from his 1877 steam-filled studies of Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare, including ‘Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare’, to his atmospheric views of London, including ‘Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk’ and ‘Charing Cross Bridge, Smoke in Fog, Impression’.
You’ll also get a look at several of Monet’s famous series of paintings hung together in a single room. These are the pieces where he returned to the exact same spot over and over to catch how the light and seasons changed. Tate has managed to pull together six works from his ‘Grainstacks’ series (1890–91) on loan from global collections, alongside highlights from his ‘Rouen Cathedral’, ‘Poplars on the Banks of the Epte’ and ‘Mornings on the Seine’ projects.
Then, of course, there’s the ‘Water Lilies’. Monet spent the last three decades of his life returning again and again to the pond in his Giverny garden, and Tate is bringing together 20 of these paintings for the show, including a handful of rare loans from Japanese institutions. The show is curated by Juliet Bingham and Genevieve Barton, organised jointly with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Monet: Painting Time, February 25 to June 27 2027, Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG.
Planning ahead? Here’s everything else coming to Tate Modern and Tate Britain as part of Tate’s full 2027 London programme.
More art news: Walthamstow’s William Morris Gallery will soon unveil a major rehang of its galleries.
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