Think of the impressionist painters as the Kenny Chesneys of the art world. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley -- museums count on them to draw crowds the way amphitheaters bank on Chesney to sell tickets.

The paintings could hardly be more inviting if they came with a map to the seaside, the garden or the picnic spot depicted and a handwritten note insisting you don't have to dress up -- just come as you are. Even the loose brush strokes suggest a relaxed encounter in a setting with colors that soothe and please.

"Impressionism is a magic word," says David Steel, the N.C. Museum of Art curator who cooked up last year's "Monet in Normandy" exhibition, regarded as a watershed cultural event for the Triangle.

Monet also figured into other popular shows at the Raleigh museum -- 1999's "Monet to Moore" and 2004's "Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris." And in October, Monet will add star power to "Landscapes From the Age of Impressionism," a touring exhibition of 40 works organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The survey includes four landscapes by Monet. Renoir and Sisley are represented, too, along with Gustave Courbet, Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pissarro. But visitors may find greater revelations in works by artists outside the pantheon of French impressionism: John Singer Sargent, Frederick Childe Hassam and Willard Leroy Metcalf.

"I think they're going to be very surprised by the Americans," Steel says.

The pictures span the early plein air painting days of 1850s France, with works by Courbet and Charles-Francois Daubigny, to the early 20th century, when Metcalf, William Glackens and Robert Spencer rendered American scenes with impressionism's broken brushwork. The show draws much of its value from the context these works provide for Monet and other impressionist masters, Steel says.

And for every art historian eager for a fresh footnote, "Landscapes From the Age of Impressionism" is the first time the museum's lower-level galleries have been advertised with their new name, the Meymandi Exhibition Center, the result of a $2.5 million gift from Dr. Assad Meymandi in honor of his father, Farajollah Meymandi.

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