EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND.- The Royal Scottish Academy will present “Monet: the Seine and the Sea, 1878 – 1883,” this August 6. Moira Jeffrey from The Herald wrote: “This week Professor Richard Thomson, the Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University, will get down to business in the newly refurbished Royal Scottish Academy by opening a rather more precious delivery, some 78 crates, each containing a priceless work of art by Claude Monet. For Thomson, and Michael Clarke, director of the National Gallery of Scotland, who have jointly curated Monet: the Seine and the Sea, 1878 - 1883, it’s the moment of truth. A decade on from the first germ of an idea - a spontaneous conversation that arose on a joint trip to Dublin in 1993 -  four years of dense art historical research and a lot of fiddling with cardboard models later, it’s time to see if their ideas really hang together.”

Thomson stated, "You discover things when you get the paintings together I’ve got the factual evidence to put this next to that, but when we actually see these paintings put together in a few days time we’ll get to see the visual evidence."

The Herald further reported: “His audience will not just be his academic colleagues, but the tens of thousands of visitors from across the world, expected to pour into the gallery this summer. The 1999 Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy in London attracted an unprecedented 800,000 visitors and has gone down on record as one of the most popular paying exhibitions in the world. If Thomson is daunted he certainly doesn’t sound it. His 1994 exhibition Monet to Matisse (curated again with Clarke, when Thomson was based at the University of Manchester) was one of the most popular shows ever put on at the National Gallery of Scotland, and his curatorial credits include Toulouse Lautrec at the Hayward Gallery in 1991 and the 1997 show Seurat and the Bathers at the National Gallery in London.”