When I first heard about plans for a show examining the work of Claude Monet in the twentieth century, I wondered why it was being done. Hadn’t we seen an awful lot of Monet in the last few years? Special exhibitions, that is—not just the many examples of his work in this country’s museums thanks to the hearty appetite of American collectors for Impressionist paintings. There was the Art Institute of Chicago’s wide-ranging retrospective in 1994 and the Brooklyn Museum’s “Monet and the Mediterranean” last fall. Earlier this year, there was the reunion of all eleven of Monet’s vaporous 1877 images of glass-roofed sheds, engines, and clouds of steam in the absorbing exhibition “Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare,” at the National Gallery, Washington. Two years ago, Monet’s paintings of the 1870s and 1880s had a starring role in the Phillips Collection’s “Impressionists on the Seine,” while in the fall of 1995, the Metropolitan’s “Origins of Impressionism” provided an illuminating context for his work of the 1860s, and about eight years back, a wonderful show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts examined Monet’s series of the 1890s— the stacks of grain, the poplars, and the façades of Rouen cathedral.[1]Cynics might say that Impressionist shows are always good box office, guaranteed crowdpleasers that assure a welcome boost to any museum’s income. Aesthetes could retort that it’s always a pleasure to see a good Monet and more of a pleasure to see a lot of good ones. But I