Saying a museum is showing a lot of French art, particularly by the likes of Matisse and Monet, is a bit like saying a doughnut shop is selling a lot of doughnuts. But the Portland Art Museum is in a particularly French mood this summer: across four shows, it’s selling sweet, soulful beignets, the kind that favor je ne sais quoi over photorealistic likeness.

Three supplemental shows hover around Monet to Matisse: French Moderns, a touring show organized by the Brooklyn Museum with a dizzying premise. It spans 100 years in Modernist French painting (with a few Rodin sculptures), the century that flipped popular tastes from realist canvases with clean, flat surfaces to boisterous, emotive, and craggy paintings most interested in capturing life’s textures.

In the art-historical sense, Modernism is a gargantuan subject. Loosely defined, it refers to art made between the mid-nineteenth and -twentieth centuries, under myriad schools of thought, each with its own ideas of how to dismantle classical conventions. Here, the scope is narrowed to France, the movement’s center, but that’s about the only restriction.

As welcoming as fan-favorite Impressionist paintings are, the show’s scope is daunting. For starters, a lot more than painting changed in that 100 years. A timeline near the entrance helps contextualize things, beginning with the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, and ending with the United Nations, founded in 1945. Between: two world wars and the Impressionist movement, not to mention Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

You may want to bring a notepad, and circle back once or twice. But if you thread your way selectively through these four shows, you can catch an intimate glimpse of how these larger-than-life figures, Claude Monet chief among them, went from ostracized rejects to some of the most widely recognized names in art history. Chasing the five Monets currently featured throughout the museum is a good place to start.

The Impressionists were named, derisively, after Monet’s Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), a painting he showed at the group’s first exhibition in 1874. Monet was one of 30 artists who, in a great controversy, organized shows outside of Paris’s official salon—the standard way artists showed their work at the time. It makes for a great story in retrospect, the biggest names cutting their own path. But in truth they held their own shows because they were rejected by the salon.

River at Lavacourt, painted a few years later in 1879, is the earliest Monet currently at PAM. It hangs in a show called Through Lines, which is essentially a condensed sampling of the museum’s permanent galleries, on view while construction of the new Rothko Pavilion continues through 2025. If you’re not already aware, Monet was big on painting scenes of water. He caught rivers in different moods, seasons, and hours, giving them as much character as any figurative study. He painted this one from his boat studio on the Seine at the end of a harsh winter and just weeks before his first wife succumbed to a terminal illness. You may not get all of that just by looking at it, but its beauty is a gloomy gray. Its opposite is the bright and cheery Les Bords de la Seine près de Vétheuil (The banks of the Seine near Vétheuil) from 1881, hanging in a sidecar show to French Moderns titled in Pissarro to Picasso. Both have a characteristic early Impressionist aesthetic, loaded with painterly marks, motion, and a distinct sensitivity to light.

A third painting, dated just one year later and featured in the main show, hints at Monet’s turn toward abstraction. Marée montante à Pourville (Rising Tide at Pourville) is filled with choppy waves that crash, cloudy with motion, against an ocean-side cliff; tall grasses and a small house atop the cliff are in a delicate soft focus, a distinct contrast from the previous two paintings’ more rigid structures.

Eventually, Monet graduated from painting scenes around the Seine River to iterating on the same exact view over and over, and his style abstracted further. Jumping forward 20 years, next is a picture from Monet’s Houses of Parliament series, one of nearly 100 paintings he made of the same view of London’s Thames River, each depicting a specific time, season, moment, or mood. But they’re not multiples like a Warhol series. They stand alone, yet hold an unmissable power of familiarity. Painting in this focused, studious way almost seems a method of honing the movement’s sensibilities, of devising a way to paint the feeling of something instead of a picture of it.

The last Monet on display is behind a different kind of glass: screens. A video installation set to open in August will provide a glimpse into the museum’s conservator’s lab as they restore one of his famous Water Lily paintings—similar to the London series, though this one lasted 30 years. If you’ve seen one Monet, it’s likely one of the 250 lily pad–filled scenes he painted of his famous bridge and pond in Giverny. Most of them are solely focused on the water’s reflections, somehow miraculously sturdy without any anchoring riverbanks or distant buildings—famously, light was all he needed to ground the scene.

Monet gets the most play across the four shows (which appear on the same floor, by the way; while intellectually exhausting, trekking through them isn’t a huge physical project). But there are other lines to follow during the Museum’s Parisian season.

Two Edgar Degas paintings give process-oriented insights. Nude Woman Drying Herself (Femme au Tub) is large and unfinished—not much more than a bold, swish outline in black brushstrokes of what its title suggests. From 20 years earlier, in 1866, there’s Portrait of a Man (Portrait d’homme). If it were another painter’s, it might also look unfinished. But Degas was a master of making paintings that know they’re paintings; marks of their making serve as windows to draw you in. Here, he uses swaths of rough, sienna-washed canvas as highlights in his sitter’s coat and trousers, instead of slicking them with thick layers of paint, and his wild black outline cuts an electric gesture across the man’s lapel and sleeve.

Two Renoirs, one in French Moderns and the other in its supplemental show, look as though they were painted one right after the next. Though most known for his early paintings of Parisian society from the 1880s, with their easy and bright colors, Renoir later moved his family to Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. Soon after, he painted this pair of enchanted, wiggly groves, one of an olive orchard and the other of grapevines.

Fun as it is tracing these chronologies, some of the most affecting works here are singular examples. There is just one Pierre Bonnard painting, 1925’s The Breakfast Room. In this case, you can use your own reality as comparison. I let out an audible sigh when I found it. Clacking heels, the creaking parquet floor, nervous whispers, hungry kids begging to leave—all noise evaporated. I hogged the painting for a good 15 minutes, ignoring other museumgoers’ expectant glances that nonverbally asked me to move.

A woman sits at a kitchen table stirring tea. A child is opening a drawer behind her. It’s fuzzy and warm, clear like a memory, not a photograph. You have no choice but to just sit at the table, to be there, wherever it is. It reminded me of Roland Barthes’s line: “it is quite simply there that I should like to live.” Maybe it’s a serene future or a sweet memory. But, again borrowing from Barthes, it’s somewhere I want to live, not merely visit.