It's been 35 years, to the day, since Canberrans first queued for Claude Monet.
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It was June 1, 1984, and the city was brimming with excitement; the two-year-old National Gallery of Australia (then called the Australian National Gallery) was about to unveil The Great Impressionists, 100 works from the Courtauld Collection in London.
They included Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and Picasso - the heavy hitters that Australians were beside themselves to see up close.
Canberra Times art critic Sasha Grishin described the exhibition at the time as the most important Impressionist exhibition ever to visit Australia.
For Canberra, it would mark the beginning of a never-ending love affair with European art.
And now, the gallery is about to open another blockbuster Impressionist exhibition, Monet: Impression Sunrise, opening on June 7. Though smaller in scale, it looks to be every bit as enticing - and popular - as the many that have come before it.
It's official: Australians have a thing for European - and particularly French - paintings.
Back in 1990, six years after the show that would leave such a lasting impression on Canberra, the gallery's inaugural director, James Mollison, would hand over the reigns to the inimitable Betty Churcher, the woman who would make a name for herself ("Betty Blockbuster") by bringing major exhibitions to the capital.
She brought in 12 international shows during her seven years at the helm; some have said she shaped the way Australians would be viewed overseas, as a nation of art lovers.
"In a very few years ... she had changed the way European galleries thought about lending to Australia," said British Museum director Neil MacGregor, at Churcher's memorial service in 2015.
"Betty was able to persuade everybody that great pictures had to be seen by as many people as possible, and that meant by as many people of Australia as possible. And one after another, great pictures of Europe came to Australia."
The love continued through the years; in 2010, then director Ron Radford presided over the gallery's most successful show to date - Masterpieces from Paris, made possible because the Musee D'Orsay in Paris was undergoing renovations. Visitors - many in Canberra for the first time - lined up for hours for a chance to wander among works by Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh.
The director of the Musee D'Orsay himself, there for the grand opening, had tears in his eyes when he saw the works, so well-known to generations of tourists and art-lovers alike, showing their true colours under the sympathetic modern lighting of the National Gallery.
And shows on either side of Masterpieces, including Renaissance (2012), Degas: Master of French Art (2008) and Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge (2013), have confirmed that the National Gallery is more than capable of hauling in the crowds.
Not to mention convincing overseas institutions to lend it priceless works, even when it involves travelling over multiple continents with dozens of couriers.
The looks on the faces of gallery-goers, even after they'd lined up for hours, made it worth it. Churcher knew it, and so does her current successor, Nick Mitzevich.
Apart from his dislike of the word 'blockbuster' - he prefers the catch-all 'major exhibition' - Mitzevich has a lot in common with Churcher. He wants, more than anything, for people, as many as possible, to feel they can engage with art. Monet: Impression Sunrise will be his first major show since taking the top job in July last year.
It's being made possible because, once again, a Parisian institution - the Musee Marmottan - is "having some work done", and is sending some of its prized works to Canberra in the interim.
"Monet's Impression Sunrise for me is a very important exhibition because it embodies what the National Gallery is about, and that is about bringing extraordinary things to Australia that help Australians understand art a little better," he says.
With a long-term interest in education and public engagement, Mitzevich is following Churcher's tradition of bringing art to the masses, in the most spectacular way possible.
"I'm so excited that this really heralds what we want to do in the future - give Australian audiences something extra, something new, something that gives them an insight and a better understanding of things they already know, and at times give them an understanding of things they don't know," he says.
"But on this occasion, it is the most loved art movement of all times, and we're giving them something they've never seen before - the painting that changed the course of art history."
The 1872 painting for which the exhibition is named is the one that sparked the entire Impressionist movement.
Although Claude Monet had been painting for many years before he captured a dreamy, misty morning over a harbour, the work, when Monet first exhibited it, attracted little more than derision from critics.
Although Claude Monet had been painting for many years before he captured a dreamy, misty morning over a harbour, the work, when Monet first exhibited it, attracted little more than derision from critics
"The art critics at the time derided the picture, and used the word 'impression' in a negative light," says Mitzevich.
"And then it stuck. It defined the movement, it defined these artists who went out and tried to capture light and mood and the time of day using colour, and these quick brilliant sketches on the canvas in the outdoors became such an important aspect of how art changed."
The painting, one of Monet's most significant, is also one of the most loved in the Marmottan's collection. The museum has never lent it before, not even to a sister institution in Paris, but the idea of keeping it in storage for months while the museum undergoes renovations obviously didn't appeal.
It will have pride of place in its namesake exhibition in a custom-designed exhibition space here in Canberra, along with the works by JMW Turner that first inspired Monet to try and capture light and mood on the canvas. There'll also be works by other artists who worked alongside Monet, equally inspired to work outdoors, and paint emotion and light.
"The other half [of the show] is works that inspired him, or artists that worked with him, like Sisley and Morrisot, artists who were in his circle who were themselves inspired by what Monet was doing," he says.
"We go on to show you those fabulous landscapes that he did, those wonderful moody paintings that he did of daybreak, sunset, of fog and steam in winter, and then we finish up with the final room, which is what Monet has been known for, the big Waterlillies series," says Mitzevich.
Also on display will be the gallery's own Monet, the much-loved Haystacks which has recently been restored, the discoloured varnish removed to reveal the painting as it must have looked when it first left Monet's studio.
Mitzevich compares the loan of Impression Sunrise to Canberra lending its prized Blue Poles or Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series. The Marmottan is so keen to have it back that Impression Sunrise will only run in Canberra for 10 weeks.
It's just long enough to bring a rosy glow to Canberra's famously cold winter, a period that conventional wisdom says is the worst time to visit the capital.
But staging a major show is a strategy the gallery has been employing since Canberra's Centenary in 2013, when it staged a major exhibition of works by Turner during winter.
Mitzevich himself may have been in Canberra for less than a year, but he's already as enamoured of the light and the seasons as Monet himself must have been by the landscapes of northern France.
From his top-floor office, he can see out across the lake, and observe the trees changing colour as the months go by.
"You can get a great sense of time here, of progressing through the year, and I love how the temperature and the environment flags progress, so you know where you are at any particular point of the year because it changes so dramatically," he says.
"For me, it gives the city this magic, that it's always changing ... I'm loving what Canberra offers, and what the National Gallery needs to do is really lead and be quite progressive in how we continually encourage people to come to Canberra. We want to do that, we want to own that territory."
More than 900,000 people came to the gallery last year, and Mitzevich sees no reason why there shouldn't be a major showing at any given time.
To that end, there's now a new, smaller temporary space that can be filled with something while the last show bumps out.
"One of the things that was obvious to me when I arrived was that the NGA needs to be on all the time," Mitzevich says.
"Of course we're stepping up, of course we're working harder, but that's our job, and one of the things that I want to do is make sure that there's always something for our audiences to see here."
Meanwhile, while timed ticketing and online bookings mean queues are a thing of the past, the buzz generated by Monet's unmistakable brush strokes is already palpable a week out from the opening.
And while it will be smaller than previous major exhibitions, with just 59 paintings, "it's going to pack a punch".
"A more modest-sized show doesn't define the content. Some of the best shows I've seen have been only 10 pictures," Mitzevich says.
"For me, it's about impact, it's about how it's relevant and resonant and gives the audience something they've never seen.
"Of course I'm going to continue to do big shows, but I'm also going to do exquisite things that are small and totally unique".
Monet: Impression Sunrise opens at the National Gallery of Australia on June 7 and runs until September 1. Tickets are now on sale, at nga.gov.au.