Aspiring 19 th -century artists flocked to the Louvre Museum to learn from the masters by copying their works.

Claude Monet took a different tack. In April 1867 he asked Louvre authorities to let him paint views from upper-level windows of new boulevards and public spaces that were transforming Paris under Napoleon III and his top city planner, Georges-Eugene Haussmann.

Monet’s window gambit resulted in three masterpieces of early French Impressionism. One of them, “The Garden of the Princess,’’ has been a mainstay of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, since it bought the work in 1948.

This fall, however, the Allen’s great Monet , which depicts a view looking southeast from the Louvre toward the Seine River and the distant dome of the Pantheon, has company. “The

See Full Page