Nearly 100,000 people from as far afield as Hawaii and Hong Kong have made advance bookings to see the exhibition of his paintings, "Monet in the 20th Century", which opens at the Royal Academy in London on 23 January.

"This is the highest number of tickets ever pre-booked for an art exhibition in the United Kingdom", said a Royal Academy spokesman.

The show has already attracted more than 500,000 people in Boston in the USA.

It groups together more than 80 paintings from the father of Impressionism.

The majority of paintings have been assembled from public and private collections in America, Europe and Japan since there is only a handful of late works by the artist in British collections.

The climax of the exhibition will be a group of large-scale, late decorative paintings which are closely related to Monet's great sequence, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, installed in the Orangerie, Paris, in 1926.

Dispute over Water Lillies

Water lilies: Theme of several Monet works

When the show opens in London, one painting called Water Lilies is likely to be missing.

The French authorities are concerned that an attempt might be made to reclaim it as an artwork plundered by the Nazis during the Second World War if it is shown in Britain.

The painting is at the centre of a dispute between the French authorities and the descendants of a Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, whose house near Bordeaux was looted in 1940.

Water Lilies was discovered after the war in a Hamburg warehouse, where it was tagged as being part of a collection owned by Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

It has been part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts at Caen since 1974.

Until its ownership is established, France will not let the painting go on display in London.

Water Lilies is one of 2,058 works of art registered in France after World War II whose ownership has yet to be established.