Twelve major paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926) are on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum (February 4-May 12, 2012) in a show titled “Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection.” Monet retreated to Giverny, the small village northwest of Paris, in 1883, and then spent the next 43 years there experimenting with landscape and garden painting. The works of art he painted there are among the most recognizable in Western Art.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is about to open an exhibition of 45 still life and landscape paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) that offers “close-ups” of his paintings of flowers, trees, open fields, forest interiors, and countryside vistas. The exhibition will remain on view until May 6, 2012.

“The American painter George Inness (1825-1894) is widely admired for the evocative poetry of his late, tonal landscapes. Based on memory and guided by spiritual conviction, however, Inness’s late works offer little sense of the careful observation and plein air study that characterized his first four decades of artistic practice, and yet they were the foundations of his art,” says Mark D. Mitchell who recently curated a traveling exhibition of Inness paintings.