The first thing you see upon entering the Monet's Garden exhibition at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum is a video of the great painter's garden at Giverny projected onto the walls around you. Ironically, it is possibly the least impressionistic representation of the garden imaginable, but it brilliantly sets up this beautifully designed exhibition's greatest reward: a more personal and immediate perspective on an artist who is often known only by visiting his most famous paintings in the halls of major museums.
After the obligatory time-lines situating Monet among political and artistic events in France, there are his palette and spectacles in a display case, portraits of his first wife and children, and one of Monet himself, painted by Renoir as he relaxes with a newspaper and his pipe.
Then it is on to the French countryside, with the sound of leaves in the wind seeming to rustle from the canvas.
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A collection of seaside scenes follow, classic sailboats and sunsets stuff. Monet's greatest works aren't in this exhibition, but what has been loaned by the Musee Marmottan Monet has been chosen and displayed well enough that they aren't badly missed. Some visitors will have seen more impressive water lilies, but as compensation digitalized sketches of boats, birds and beaches provide a closer look at how Monet worked.
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An extraodinary group of paintings from Monet's later life when his vision was severely impaired and tinted yellow by cataracts round off the exhibition. When he eventually recovered his sight he was apparently surprised by them, but happy he had faithfully painted what he had seen.
Like the exhibition text says of Monet's work, this selection "combines opposites: the big and the small, the overall and the detail, the legible and the illegible, as if to better signify that they are the expression of one single reality."
Here you can meet the man behind the masterpieces.