From the reputed Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the NGV’s French Impressionism exhibition is an immersive experience that takes visitors back in time. Each group of artwork is creatively sectioned off into different rooms that are evocative of nineteenth century residencies and art lounges. Each lounge is replete with intricately detailed wall paper designs, carpets, different shades of lighting and elegantly stylish couches in every room, that makes visitors feel like they are not only seeing artworks but are in the artworks themselves.

Travelling across the different rooms felt like stepping into different impressions. From the hallway, the first room I walked into was a spacious chandelier-lit room that was reminiscent of a nineteenth century nobility’s sitting room. This led on to a vastly different room with dark wood tiled and green wall-papered that held the nature paintings collection.  Walking through that room was like walking into a forest, surrounded by lush green paintings of trees. Another exquisitely designed room housed the nautical paintings collection, which featured blue naval-striped wall-paper decorated with palm leaves. Each section is not just intricately detailed, but also very immersive.

My favorite section in  the exhibition was the nautical room. Besides the beautifully blue walls, this room also features a couch that is designed in the shape of a mooring buoy, with a potted palm plant sprouting from its top like a light beam. The couch floats on a blue carpet that looks like the sea—it is a painting in it of itself. Another standout of the exhibition were the contrasting styles of two most popular names in Impressionism, Renoir and Monet, who each had a room dedicated to their works. Renoir’s section is painted rich burgundy, adorned with gold tiles that are reflective of his experimentalism and bold use of saturated pure colours in his artworks. Monet’s on the other hand, is clean, minimalist, a large spacious circular room that had ample natural lighting, aptly captured by his quote: “what I will bring back here will be pure, gentle sweetness: some white, some pink, and some blue, and all this surrounded by the fairylike air.”

The paintings flowed together in a way where they told their own story. Being able to see two paintings side by side, their similarities and their differences, really provided a window into the artists’ thought processes, who their inspirations and mentors were and what aspects of Impressionism they challenged. Despite large crowds on the Sunday I visited, I was able to glide through the paintings, and appreciate them both individually and as a collective.

The exhibition’s effort to include more female Impressionist artists and subjects compared to past exhibitions is worthy of some praise. One of my favourite paintings in the exhibition was Renoir’s Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow (c. 1890), a simple portrayal of girls enjoying each other’s presence without care of a potential male viewer. The soft colours and freely drawn brush strokes have always scratched an itch in my brain, and being able to see it in person was my personal highlight.

However, with Impressionism’s huge feminist history, this effort fell short in other aspects–inclusion alone is not enough. Instead, the exhibition should have attempted to highlight how much of the movement they pioneered. While a total of four women artists were included in the exhibition, which is greater than its predecessors, more attention could have been placed on their individual contributions. Women behind and on the canvas opened the viewer to their once neglected experiences, lives and emotions. This lack of context and representation was disappointing as it was what I was most excited to see when entering the exhibition.

The still life section of the exhibition highlights this issue. While the room was filled with female artists, the placards fail to acknowledge the contributions women made to still life after being confined to this medium for so long. Landscape and still life have long been seen as inferior forms of paintings in art history, both male and female Impressionists challenged this notion, allowing women to break out of the stereotype. This omission does a disservice to the challenges faced by both the women artists and Impressionists as a whole for harbouring respect for their work. While I was very excited to see some of my favourite pieces from Berthe Morisot and others exhibited, I wish their innovative portrayal of women in art was highlighted by the placards that accompanied the works.

Another important aspect of Impressionist history that was barely touched on in the exhibition was the large influence Japanese art had on the movement. While the exhibition did a great job showing the origins of Impressionism, it was disappointingly brief. For instance, the use of white utilised by one of the paintings exhibited, Claude Monet’s Haystacks (Snow Effect) (1891), is heavily influenced by Japanese art. During this period in France, Japanese art, culture and fashion were incredibly popular and pervaded those spheres, yet the exhibition only briefly mentions it in a small placard near one of the paintings. Since placards are often glossed over by viewers, visual representations of these influences through the display of Japanese art would’ve created a more interesting story of how Impressionism came to be.

NGV’s French Impressionism exhibition presents a delectable palette of impressions. In the chaotic turmoil of our contemporary world, the soft hues of Impressionism might just be the escapism we need, to step into a simpler more colourful realm. However, the exhibition presented an incomplete story, excluding the large contributions made by women and Japanese artists that informed the works of famous Impressionists like Monet and Renoir.