From May 19 to October 21, 2012, The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) will present an exhibit titled “Monet’s Garden” that will include two original paintings by Claude Monet as well as films, concerts, poetry readings, and hands-on children’s programs related to the famed Impressionist artist. Photographs by Elizabeth Murray documenting Monet’s garden in Giverny, France over the past 25 years will also be on view in the Bronx borough of New York City.

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 Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently reopened the American Wing of 26 renovated and enlarged galleries. On display are some of the best known paintings by Frederic E. Church, Worthington Whittredge, John Singer Sargent, and Thomas Cole. For the first time, those masterpieces are hung next to related plein air studies, sculptures, and period furniture.

Reductions in government funding in the United Kingdom are threatening London’s Tricycle Theatre, but Al Weil, a collector and philanthropist, is allowing the theatre to raise money by selling approximately 35 paintings from his collection of work by the Victorian artist, Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821-1906), who was one of John Singer Sargent’s close friends and painting companions.

Two new exhibitions in the United States and one in England bring attention to the remarkably diverse artwork of Edgar Degas. All the works on display will demonstrate the French artist’s skill in accurately recording what he observed in nature and the creative ways he blended those observations with his lingering memories.

Major museum exhibitions are again bringing attention to the intricate plein air drawings, watercolors, and oils created by William Trost Richards (1833-1905). Because of his early training as a commercial draftsman, his interests in literature, and his pantheistic belief that nature was “one of the appointed ways for the saving of men,” he created highly details works of art representing a “truth to nature.”