National Gallery of Victoria curator Sophie Matthiesson unveils the Winter Masterpieces featuring works by Claude Monet such as the Vetheuil painting. Picture: Aaron Francis Source: The Australian

THE National Gallery of Victoria's Tony Ellwood will be hoping for a repeat success similar to that of the gallery's 2004 impressionism show when he presents Monet's Garden in Melbourne next May.

Monet's Garden will be the 10th of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibitions that began with The Impressionists in 2004, the most attended show in the series with 380,000 visitors.

The Monet exhibition will be devoted almost exclusively to the best-known of the impressionist painters, featuring Monet's produced at his famous house and garden at Giverny. About 50 works will be drawn from the biggest collection in the world of Monet's paintings, the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris. Other international collections will also be lending to the exhibition.

Organised through Art Exhibitions Australia, Monet's Garden will be curated by the NGV's curator of international art, Sophie Matthieson, and the deputy director of the Marmottan, Marianne Mathieu.

Planning for the exhibition predates Ellwood's return last August to the NGV, where he succeeded Gerard Vaughan as director. Ellwood says exhibitions in the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series are intended to have broader appeal than some other specialist shows, such as Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists, opening at the NGV on November 16.

"The exhibitions have to be underpinned by good scholarship," he says of the MWM series. "We don't get the quality lines (artworks) unless we guarantee new writing and a whole suite of academic programs that accompany the experience.

"That's the other thing that the NGV is very good at."

The first part of the exhibition will chart Monet's travels around Normandy and to London while the Giverny garden was being laid out. The second part will focus exclusively on the Giverny garden, with its emblematic waterlilies and Japanese footbridge.

It will discuss Monet's protectiveness of his family and garden, and the effect of failing eyesight on his art. A video installation will depict a day in the garden at Giverny.

The exhibition is being developed for Melbourne, with what Ellwood hopes will have "particular resonance for our market".

"Certainly, Monet and impressionism is a very popular theme," Ellwood says. "We hope it does well. It deserves to because we have captured some really extraordinary pictures."