This show offers a rare chance to encounter, up close and in detail, the evolving ways of seeing and painting that established the originality, historical importance and continuing irresistibility of Monet's art.
Valued for their originality and historical significance, not for the quality of a restoration, they present the wizened, character-laden faces of survivors rather than the unlined Botoxed perfection of aging starlets with plastic surgeons on speed dial.
He did not do this trivially, for the cheap thrill of mimicry, but rather out of a principled mistrust of originality and the historical construction of literary heroes.
The "G" word, as in genius, was dismissed as romantic fetishism; and talk of exceptional originality not explainable by historical or social context was written off as starry-eyed mush.
In the Sunday Times, Nick Rennison called it "one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade" which, "for originality, richness of prose and depth of characterisation is unlikely to be bettered this year".
Part of the effect in '08 was this historical moment, and in part, it was the originality of that closing story.
If Etty really was determined, as he declared, to bring back the nude and the grand historical themes to painting and if he had had the originality to carry it out in a form fully of his own, he might have gone down as a great innovator.
In the years after his death, his novels, especially Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar (1924; "Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar"), came to be appreciated for their originality of style, rather than solely for their ideological or historical significance.
Really, though, originality is not the point of this movie, any more than historical verisimilitude is.
