Monet: the Seine and

the Sea

Venue: Royal Scottish Academy Building

Time: Aug 6-Oct 26

What more can we say about Claude Monet the artist whose work - Impression, Sunrise of 1873 - gave name to the movement we now know as impressionism? He was the brilliant painter of light and air,

of poppy fields and water. The artist, too, of busy suburbs and the new city. We know his most famous paintings like we know the prints in our own sitting rooms. Indeed, they are the prints in our sitting rooms.

Every decade or so, though, it seems we get a new Monet. We've had Monet the great artist of modern life, Monet the rural radical; we've had Monet the tweedy anglophile, the grand old man, and even Monet the abstract expressionist. We've pored over his letters, tramped through his garden at Giverny, and seen whatever we chose to see reflected in his pond. Beneath the money and the merchandising is there any Monet left?

Yet, just as surely as we're certain we've worn the waterlilies T-shirt until it has faded and long since drunk the dregs from our Monet mugs, up pops another Monet. A troubled artist, turning 40, who is tired of Paris, tired of impressionism and its ''daubers'', who has money worries and a wife dying of cancer, and who is beginning to compete, not with his contemporaries, but a just-passed generation of French landscape painters such as Courbet and Corot. A Monet who paints rural idylls despite personal trials, who is focusing on history, when his present is painful, and a Monet who tests himself against the elements as much as the art market.

It is this artist that the curators of Monet: the Seine and the Sea, 1878-1883, hope we'll encounter in his 78 paintings on show at the Royal Scottish Academy Building this summer, in an unusually tight exhibition that includes almost one-quarter of the 300 paintings he made in the period alongside a small selection of those of his predecessors in French landscape.

It was the railway which in the impressionist's work had seemed to symbolise the dawn of a new age, and it was the railway (or, more specifically, the lack of it) that brought Monet in 1878 to the village of Vetheuil on the banks of the Seine. The lack of a train service meant rents were low, and with an ill wife and the financial troubles of his best patron Ernest Hoschede hitting home it provided a cheap place to stay.

Hoschede's family came along, too: his wife, Alice, and their children, and in the months his wife Camille endured her illness and in the increasing absence of Ernest, Monet and Alice grew close. It was a relationship that would eventually lead to a second marriage for Monet but there is no question that he found the loss of Camille, in 1879 at the age of 32, unbearable. The picture of Camille on her deathbed showing her shrouded body, that has been loaned by the Musee d'Orsay, is an astonishing image of loss which forms the most powerful emotional moment of the show.

''It's very rarely acknowledged in that way,'' says Professor Richard Thomson of Edinburgh University who has curated the exhibition along with Michael Clarke, director of the National Gallery of Scotland, ''yet it's a picture about heartbreak. It's not a portrait. Conventionally a deathbed portrait is an attempt to capture the facial features, the likeness of the person before they disappear forever. With Monet you can barely make that face out. It's as if he can't face the fact she's died.''

It is probably the only overtly emotional picture of the show, though some critics have read the beautiful images of breaking ice on the Seine during the harsh winter of 1879-80 as signs of Monet's emotional freeze and thaw. Many of the Vetheuil works are rural landscapes or garden pictures through which the Monet and Hoschede children, and Alice herself, flit.

But from 1881 Monet was beginning to move on again, making visits to the Normandy coast where his vertiginous views of the sea bring a new drama to his work and his series of paintings of the cliff formation at Etretat begin to prefigure the series works of his later life.

If perhaps the artist had earlier been giving vent to his feelings of sorrow, now he was reflecting his appetites. ''He was a sensual man,'' says Thomson. ''And the way he produces some rich colour, particularly the way he is beginning to exaggerate local colours, shows that sort of sensual quality.''

It is these works which are the most striking to the modern eye. They suggest a romantic sensibility, which until now Monet had kept under wraps. If this exhibition is to give us yet another new Monet, it will be a Monet who after pain and heartbreak rediscovered what it might mean to be a man.

These are, says Richard Thomson, works of art painted both literally and metaphorically on the edge. ''I think they are cusp pictures, he's aware at time of the dangers of working on these cliffs. He writes to Alice that he's taken his brother for a walk on the cliffs, and at one point he has to hold his hand because he was freaked out by the height. There's that sense of manliness; I can face up to things. I can do this.''

Exhibition sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland

Monet: the Seine and

the Sea

Venue: Royal Scottish Academy Building

Time: Aug 6-Oct 26