The Monet exhibition currently showing in Paris is garnering its fair share of international hype. This is the biggest retrospective of the painter’s work for over a decade and it is extensive, with 176 paintings displayed across three floors. The organisers knew that this would be a popular show: signage is found in three languages, and audio-guides in more.

As I arrived it was raining heavily, and despite holding the Sésame pass I had to queue outside for 45 minutes before finally entering into a gallery which was crowded with visibly steaming people. As such, the curation was to be crucial in smoothly guiding the crush of visitors around the exhibition.

Whoever assembled this show did not do it well, given this foreseen popularity. The paintings were arranged thematically by subject, which undermined chronology and produced confusing displays. A simple chronological ordering would have resulted in a degree of thematic ordering, and would have been considerably more transparent to viewers.

However, the hype was somewhat justified, as there were certainly a lot of paintings from all over the world: even one from the Fitzwilliam Museum was found rubbing shoulders with the others. There is a photographic quality in the immediacy of Monet’s light studies: he used paint to draw light. He was studying something which photography is ideally suited to – the varying effects of light on the same subject. Rather than grabbing a black-and-white camera, Monet chose to look beyond the simple depiction of light and dark by exploring its chromatic effects. The studies of ice floes depict the sombre end of this colour spectrum, whilst the Cliff at Pourville provided opportunity for a vibrant, warm palette. Even within his considerable stylistic variations, Monet’s sensitivity to the colour of light is profound.

I would have liked to know more of the details surrounding the paintings, such as the artist’s personal circumstances and contemporary reception. Seeing the portrait of Monet’s wife Camille on her deathbed displayed alongside paintings of her as a vivacious society woman was jarring and bewildering, without any contextual information to explain so stark a contrast. Such shortcomings were all too frequent in an exhibition which failed to reach its full potential, not through a fault of the art, but through the most basic errors of organisation.