How does our experience of art change if we slow down and spend an extended period of time contemplating one work? What details will we notice, and how might our perception of the work change?
Drawing on visual sensibilities, imagination and personal reflections, art historian and educator Dr Olivia Meehan will guide you through observation and slow looking techniques in the heart of the French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition.
This session will be held in the final room of the exhibition, surrounded by paintings by Claude Monet, providing a unique opportunity to experience these incredibly moving works in a more reflective and contemplative way.
Dr Olivia Meehan is an art historian and object-based learning specialist. She concentrates on slow looking/contemplative pedagogies in discipline-led curriculum design to support visual intelligence. Olivia received her MPhil and PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge, her graduate research focused on the circulation of cultural material and ideas in early modern Europe and Japan. Her book Slow Looking: The Art of Nature, published by Thames & Hudson, is out in September 2025.
This program is free and no booking is required, but exhibition admission fees apply to enter the French Impressionism exhibition.
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Drawn from MFA Boston’s rich collection of Impressionist masterworks, French Impressionism presents more than 100 paintings by key figures including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac and Alfred Sisley. Audiences have the opportunity to experience the hallmarks of Impressionism: distinctive brushwork, vivid use of colour, innovative viewpoints, and depictions of subjects and places dear to the artists. The exhibition’s scenography draws inspiration from the grand nineteenth-century residences of East Coast American collectors – where works such as these would have been displayed – as well as some of the spaces beloved by the artists themselves.
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