Beyond Monet – Royal Highland Centre

There’s something delightfully odd about stepping into one of the colossal cattle halls of the Royal Highland Centre and finding yourself transported into Monet’s luminous world of haystacks, lily ponds, and steam trains. Edinburgh’s Beyond Monet is the smaller sibling of last year’s Glasgow Beyond Van Gogh installation, but size, as it turns out, is only part of the story.

The Royal Highland Centre, by contrast, offers a more contained, unified volume. Here, the projections encircle you on all four walls with complete synchronicity, transforming the experience into something more cohesive. Instead of moving through fragments and competing tableaux, you sink into a single visual world. Oddly enough, the smaller building produces a bigger emotional effect. The room becomes womb-like, dare I say, like being held gently inside a giant marshmallow, or perhaps like floating on a water lily the size of a curling rink.

This cohesiveness pays off handsomely in certain sequences. The haystacks section is a standout. Monet painted them obsessively, tracking the warm oranges of sunrise through to the deep blues and violets of dusk. Here, all of those canvases bloom side by side, wrapping the room in a powerful, evolving halo of colour. As the palette cools, the projections dissolve into a delicate snowfall, drifting across every haystack simultaneously to a meditative soundtrack. Moments later, the colours and the soundtrack shift again, deepening into a surprising rave-like burst of reds and purples, an unexpected but rather satisfying descent into drama before the serenity returns.

As an architect, I can’t help judging buildings as much as what’s projected onto them. The SEC in Glasgow gave Van Gogh acres of height and breathing space, a vast cathedral of pixels where entire sequences played out simultaneously on different wall planes. You could wander freely and be hit by ten swirling storms of colour at once, as if Vincent’s tumultuous life demanded multiple emotional weather systems operating in parallel.

There are other delights. A steam train chugs its way through multiple canvases, its movement cleverly stitched into the surrounding landscapes. The effect is subtle but wonderfully animating, Monet’s world, normally frozen in time, suddenly exhales and moves. For fans of the painter, these small moments of motion are pure pleasure.

Of course, any immersive Monet comes with the unavoidable comparison to the Van Gogh experience, which shares the same producers. The contrast between the artists themselves is almost theatrical, Monet, who lived long enough to become the sage of Giverny, chasing light across gardens and cathedrals, and Van Gogh, burning through life in just 37 years, leaving behind furious, emotionally charged canvases and a trail of turmoil. No surprise, then, that the Van Gogh installation feels stormier and more dramatic, while Beyond Monet leans into clarity, calm, and the slow rhythmic unfolding of colour. And in fact, audiences can experience both approaches under the same roof, Beyond Van Gogh runs in the same venue on alternate days, offering the perfect opportunity to compare the two immersions directly. Check the programme to see which show is running when.

Not everything is picture-perfect, though. The main hall is decidedly cold, the sort of chill that settles into your shoulders, and the slatted wooden benches provided for seating are not designed for lingering. They’re visually unobtrusive, as well as uncomfortable and after a short while you find yourself shifting about like a pigeon on a railing. The experience also bookends the main hall with two ancillary rooms, one introductory space offering a brief skim of Monet’s life and context (perfectly serviceable, but unlikely to detain anyone for long), and an exit room decked out with oversized plastic sunflowers and a recreated footbridge from Giverny. It’s colourful, certainly, but tips alarmingly close to Wonka Land, I half-expected an Oompa Loompa to wander out dispensing guided tours. From there you’re funnelled into the inevitable merchandise shop, an explosion of Monet and Van Gogh trinkets that feels, if not exactly offensive, then at least a touch tonally jarring after the contemplative atmosphere of the main hall. Still, such is the economics of immersive art, beauty may be priceless, but someone has to pay the bills!

The question, of course, is whether it’s worth the money, no pun intended. Ticket prices creep into the premium bracket, and for casual culture-seekers the cost may feel steep. The location doesn’t help, the Royal Highland Centre is near Edinburgh Airport but not quite near enough. It’s a shade too far from the tram route to make dropping in on arrival or departure frictionless. Taxis will inevitably do the heavy lifting, which bumps the price again.

But faulting the setting feels almost ungenerous when the actual experience is this immersive, this carefully paced, and, at several points, simply exquisite. Beyond Monet may be physically smaller than its Glasgow cousin, but artistically it feels strangely larger. More focused. More enveloping. More like stepping quietly into Monet’s mind at twilight and letting the colours close over your head.

Open until Friday 2^nd January 2026 https://www.royalhighlandcentre.co.uk/event/beyond-monet–beyond-van-gogh

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 28^th November 2025

North West End UK Rating:

Running time – 1hr Approx.