The National Gallery has announced it will partner with Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery as part of its Masterpiece Tour 2025-27.
Ferens will join the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; South Shields Museum and Art Gallery and Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, as part of the tour, which has been running for over a decade. This marks the first edition of the tour which will work with four partners.
The work selected for the first year is Monet’s The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil (1872), a work which has left the Gallery only once in the last 20 years. Monet depicts a tranquil scene of a winter day on the outskirts of the small suburban town of Argenteuil, not far from Paris. Although the town was already partly industrialised and a popular location for sailing and leisure boating, Monet only hints at this developing bustle with a few scattered buildings behind a screen of trees. Instead, he focuses on an intimate moment by the river. The orderly composition, variety of brushstrokes and reflection in the water are all regular features of Monet’s work.
Since its inception in 2014, The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour has reached 400,953 people across the UK. The National Touring programme, including The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour and other travelling exhibitions, has now reached 1,467,618 people since 2014.
As part of the ongoing commitment to share the collection, this exhibition partnership, made possible by the generous support from Hiscox, offers four UK museums and galleries outside of London the opportunity to work with the National Gallery for three years and display three major artworks from the collection.
For this edition of the Masterpiece Tour, partners will each connect with a local community organisation to support the exhibition or public programme related to the selected painting each year. Each partner will develop their own display to explore and draw out themes most relevant to them and their communities.
The Ferens Art Gallery exhibition will be co-curated with Flourish, the gallery’s creative group for children and young people, organised with and for disabled and neurodivergent visitors. Together, they will create a multi-sensory immersive space that is an olfactory, acoustic and tactile experience. The exhibition will showcase select works from the Ferens’s vast collection alongside contemporary responses from Flourish to enable visitors to see and experience art from a new and inclusive perspective.
Councillor Rob Pritchard, portfolio holder for culture and leisure at Hull City Council, said: “It is a great honour to be part of this prestigious partnership with the National Gallery, offering residents and visitors to Hull a chance to see such a significant piece of artwork up close. I look forward to seeing the exhibition come together with Flourish and know it will prove extremely popular.”
National Gallery Director, Sir Gabriele Finaldi, said: “The National Gallery’s collection belongs to all of us. It is part of our duty and our honour to look after these paintings and to bring them to where people are, not just expect them to come to us. Partnering on touring exhibitions does so much more than bring beloved paintings from the collection to other places in the UK – it supports the whole country’s cultural ecosystem, connects people with paintings that belong to us all, and allows us to learn and expand our own practices and interpretations through the creativity of our partner organisations and their communities. That over one million people have visited these exhibitions in the last decade proves the desire to engage with our collection is growing and we look forward to welcoming the next million visitors across the UK.”
Hiscox Head of Art and Private Clients, Robert Read, said: “Art is an important part of the culture at Hiscox, so we’re delighted to continue our support for the National Gallery, a world-renowned art institution with a total commitment to quality. As the gallery’s first contemporary art partner, we are now entering the eighth year of our relationship and are very supportive of the Masterpiece Tour’s commitment to bringing important works of art to a wider audience. We look forward to working with the four chosen partners and expanding our support into new parts of the UK.”
