Claude Monet: The Mill at Limetz, 1888

This painting is an outstanding example of Monet’s mature Impressionist style. The composition is dominated by the dense foliage of the trees, rendered in rich hues of blue, green, and violet. The stone grain mill of Limetz appears in the right background, as if crowded to the edge of the picture. The unusual choice of vantage point intensifies the sense of immediacy—a key feature of Impressionism. 

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Camille Pissarro: The Louvre, Morning, Spring, 1902

Isolated accents of bright red lend freshness and dynamism to this morning view of the Palais du Louvre. The painting is one of a group of around 60 depictions of Paris , which Pissarro produced at the beginning of the 20th century on the Île de la Cité, the oldest part of the French capital. The works were executed as a series – a procedure inspired by the example of Claude Monet.

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Gustave Caillebotte: Wild Garden at Le Petit Gennevilliers, ca. 1882–84

Gustave Caillebotte painted Wild Garden at Le Petit Gennevilliers between 1882 and 1884, during a phase in which he increasingly focused on landscape painting. He found his motifs in the environs of his country house at Le Petit Gennevilliers, a village on the Seine near Paris. The painting’s glowing color and free brushwork point to the influence of the garden pictures of Claude Monet, in whose company Caillebotte’s painting is displayed in the Hasso Plattner Collection. The work was previously held in various private collections and is publicly exhibited for the first time at the Museum Barberini.

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Maximilien Luce: The Seine at the Pont Saint-Michel, 1900

The painting by the Neo-Impressionist Maximilien Luce was painted in 1900 along with three other views of the Pont Saint-Michel. In his images of the bustling metropolis, Luce echoed the Paris pictures of older colleagues like Gustave Caillebotte. The work combines the free brushwork of Impressionism with the mosaic structure of Pointillist painting. In the future, Maximilien Luce’s cityscape is presented in the Paris chapter of the collection, where it offers a Pointillist counterpart to the boulevards and rooftops of Pissarro and Caillebotte.

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Henri-Edmond Cross: Rio San Trovaso, Venice, 1903–04

This painting by  Henri-Edmond Cross, painted in 1903–04 during a stay by the artist in Venice, is the fourth work by Cross to enter the Hasso Plattner Collection. The Venetian canal is enveloped by a glowing veil of mist in the gleaming light of the midday sun. The impasto application of jewel-like colors is characteristic of the artist’s late Pointillist work. In the early twentieth century, the picture belonged to a private collection in Germany and was shown at the pioneering exhibition of the Sonderbund in Cologne in 1912.

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Pierre Bonnard: Still Life, 1939

This painting by Pierre Bonnard from 1939 is the first work by the artist in the Hasso Plattner Collection. In his paintings, Bonnard—who once described himself as “the last of the Impressionists”—combined borrowings from Claude Monet with the intense colorism of the Fauves. The compressed perspective and tightly cropped composition give this late still life an enigmatic, dream-like quality. From 1990 to 2022 the painting was on view as a permanent loan at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Claude Monet: The Pond, Snow Effect, 1874/75

After his return from London, where he had sought refuge during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Monet did not return to the Paris of his student days. Instead, like many of his artist friends, he moved to one of the smaller towns along the Seine that were easily accessible from Paris.  Here, figures stroll across an open, snow-covered field in the midday sun, not far from the artist’s home in Argenteuil. Monet captured the carefree moment and radiant light, juxtaposing complementary colors such as orange and blue, yellow and violet.

Claude Monet: The Ball-Shaped Tree, Argenteuil, 1876

The painting shows the lower end of the promenade at Argenteuil as seen from across the river at Le Petit Gennevilliers. Unlike the other Seine views he painted in this location showing bridges and sailboats, here Monet concentrates on the reflections of houses and trees on the surface of the water. The handsome villas bear witness to the prosperity of the Parisian upper middle class, who spent their summer holidays here. Like the Japanese woodcut artists he admired so much, Monet composed the river landscape in zones running parallel to the picture plane.

Claude Monet: The Apple Tree, 1879

In this scene, painted near Vétheuil, Monet captures the fleeting splendor of an apple tree in full bloom against a cloud-filled sky—as promising and ephemeral as the passing clouds. Since the previous year, when he had left Argenteuil and moved to the secluded village on the Seine, Monet had occupied himself with painting the fruit trees at the foot of the hill of Chantemesle with the church of Vétheuil in the background, the village as seen from the other side of the river, and his first garden.

Claude Monet: Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1900–1903

Monet began his series Houses of Parliament while visiting London from 1899 to 1901 and continued to develop them in his studio in Giverny. The towers of Westminster Palace stand out as deep blue silhouettes against the red-violet sky, colored by the setting sun amidst the characteristic London smog. As in the work of his role models J. M. W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, they appear before a dramatic, cloud-filled sky or dissolve into the fog.

Houses of Parliament, Sunset und The Apple Tree were exhibited in 1904 and 1906 in Berlin, where they were presented by Paul Cassirer before being sold to American buyers. The newly acquired winter landscape has been exhibited only once before, in Paris in 1879. The painting from the series of the Houses of Parliament was last shown in public in 1976.

Monet in the Collection