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Late in October, Linda and I took a little getaway to Santa Barbara to see The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse, an impressive group of works from the Dallas Museum of Art, now on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. We were honestly surprised by how many top-notch Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings Dallas owns. It’s one of the strongest collections outside France. After the museum, we grabbed lunch at a cozy streetside café and felt like we’d created our own California version of the perfect Parisian museum day.

The Dallas paintings were paired with a second exhibition featuring 19th-century French works from Santa Barbara’s own collection, which made the whole visit feel especially rich.

Together, these two shows offer the best chance Californians have had in years to see so many great 19th-century French paintings in one place—really not since the big 2010–2011 Musée d’Orsay exhibitions at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Earlier this year, in our March and April editions, we revisited those two landmark shows—The Birth of Impressionism and Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionism from the Musée d’Orsay—which the de Young presented about 15 years ago.

The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse tells the story of one of the most exciting turning points in art history, a moment when painters broke away from old traditions and leaned into modern subjects, bold color, and natural light. The whole show is drawn from the excellent holdings of the Dallas Museum of Art and celebrates the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. It follows the movement from its audacious beginnings all the way through its huge impact on modern art.

Below are many of the paintings from the exhibition, grouped by artist.

Throughout the show, you can see how artists like Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Gustave Caillebotte pushed back against the strict rules of the French Academy. Instead of polished, idealized scenes, they painted everyday life with fresh color, loose brushstrokes, and an immediacy that shocked audiences of their time.

Step into the quiet dignity of rural France. Peasant Woman Carrying Two Bundles of Hay is a simple, down-to-earth painting, but it carries a lot of emotional weight. We’re right there with this woman as she walks along a country path, balancing two heavy bundles with steady determination. Pissarro was fifty-three when he painted this, at a time when he was moving away from pure landscape scenes and turning his attention to the everyday lives of working people. He wanted to shine a light on those who were usually overlooked, people whose strength, endurance, and resilience he admired. For him, art wasn’t just about making something pretty; it was about honoring the quiet dignity of real life.

For a short stretch, Camille Pissarro experimented with Georges Seurat’s new Pointillist technique. Apple Harvest is one of the standout works from that brief period. The painting glows with dots of pure color, reds, blues, greens, pinks, lavenders, oranges, and yellows, blending in your eye to recreate the sparkling afternoon light of the French countryside. Pissarro didn’t rush this one; he worked on it for as long as two years and made more than a hundred drawings and studies to get every figure and detail just right.

Pissarro’s Place du Théâtre Français: Fog Effect comes from a series he painted from his room at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. He returned to this same view fifteen times, each painting capturing a different mood depending on the weather. In this version, the Place du Théâtre Français is softened and almost swallowed by wintery fog—a quiet, atmospheric moment in the middle of Paris.

In The Fish Market, Dieppe; Grey Weather, Morning, Pissarro takes what could be a loud, chaotic market scene and turns it into something surprisingly calm. Stalls, baskets, and vendors fill the square, but instead of crisp outlines he uses soft, broken brushstrokes and a gentle gray light. Cool greys and blues mix with muted reds and browns in the clothing and awnings, giving just enough detail to suggest movement and conversation without spelling everything out. Painted late in his career, it shows that Pissarro never stopped caring about the everyday rhythms of ordinary life.

Monet's Still Life, Tea Service offers a peaceful, almost meditative moment. A porcelain teapot and teacups sit on a red lacquer tray next to a silver spoon, a crisp white cloth, and a small pot of greenery. These are ordinary objects, but Monet treats them with real attention and care. It’s not his usual subject, but here he’s fascinated by how light glints off porcelain and silver and dances across glossy leaves. This painting doesn’t try to dazzle, it whispers. It reminds you that beauty can live in the quiet ritual of afternoon tea.

Monet’s broad, tranquil view of The Seine at Lavacourt from Vétheuil, has a calm, settled feeling. He didn’t paint this one entirely outdoors. Instead, he sketched the scene en plein air and finished the painting back in his studio, which gave the whole composition a nicely balanced, thoughtful structure.

He made The Seine at Lavacourt with tradition in mind. It was his bid to get accepted into the 1880 Salon, and it worked. Critics, even the conservative ones, praised its “luminous and clear atmosphere.” It later became the first major European painting to join the DMA’s collection.

Valle Buona, Near Bordighera shows the sunlit hills of the Italian Riviera. Monet, at forty-four, spent the winter and early spring of 1884 in Bordighera, and the Mediterranean light absolutely captivated him. In this painting, he captures a moment of quiet awe: hills gently folding into each other, brilliant Mediterranean sunshine, and a sense of wild nature brushing up against mountain slopes that fall toward the sea. Monet joked that painting there felt like “fencing, wrestling with the sun," and you can feel that intensity in the colors.

Monet painted Waterloo Bridge, London during one of his long stays in the city, when he became absolutely obsessed with the way fog could swallow the skyline. Instead of sharp details, he gives you atmosphere, soft purples, smoky blues, and that hazy glow where the sun tries to push through the mist. Monet worked on these London scenes for years, often reworking them back in France, chasing that perfect balance of shimmer and blur.

And honestly, photos don’t do it justice. The way the light shimmers on the water—a mix of soft pinks, blues, and silvery highlights. It is something you really have to see in person.

Monet’s Poplars, Pink Effect catches a peaceful riverside moment, with tall, slim poplars reflected in softly moving water. It’s part of his 1891 “Poplars” series, painted from his floating studio on the Epte River. Yes, he really worked from a little boat.

Water Lilies is one of Monet’s later water-lily paintings. Earlier on, his Nymphéas works often included a horizon line or some kind of anchor to help you orient yourself. Over time, though, he moved toward something more abstract. In this painting, the details melt away into looser, more gestural strokes—just shimmering color and movement.