// FROM THE TURN OF THE CENTURY UNTIL THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Still Life with Parakeet, by Robert Delaunay, illustrates the Neo-Impressionist technique adopted for a time by the painter. Emerging in 1885–86, this artistic current, most often associated with the work of Seurat and Signac, sought to carry the Impressionists’ reflections on Chevreul’s theory of colour to a deeper level, favouring the use of small dots of colour, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer’s eye.

This section also presents works by major artists such as Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin, Pierre Bonnard and Claude Derain, who developed a new conception of nature and of art at the turn of the 20th century. These painters shifted the focus of French landscape painting to the investigation of light and colour, an emphasis shared by the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

The museum’s collection of Impressionist landscapes includes one of the loveliest versions by Monet of the Valley of the Creuse (1889). Two paintings by Guillaumin, Ruins of the Château de Crozant (1898) and Pointe Notre-Dame at Trayas (1913), together with Bonnard’s Normandy Landscape (1920) form a coherent group embracing both Impressionist and Post-Impressionist approaches to landscape painting.