Some of the most famous paintings of the 19th century have crossed the Atlantic to find a temporary home in Berlin, writes Derek Scally.

A red-haired cailín is not someone you expect to encounter in an exhibition of 19th-century French art. But there she is, La Belle Irlandaise (Portrait of Jo)by Gustave Courbet, one of 150 works making a one-off appearance in Berlin until October.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's French impressionist collection of Courbet, Cezanne, Manet and Degas is rivalled only by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris but, until now, has never been moved en masse to this side of the Atlantic. But while the museum's Fifth Avenue home is being renovated, a rare exception was made for Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe's landmark gallery near Potsdamer Platz.

The exhibits span the entire impressionist era, when young artists broke with their elders to pursue a lighter, brighter painting style. They took their easels out of the studio and used vivid colours and bold brushstrokes to capture landscapes and contemporary life in ever-changing natural light. Considering the cooing reception given today to works such as Degas's Dance Classor Courbet's Woman with a Parrot, it's hard to imagine the consternation these works and their creators caused in 19th-century Paris.

Faced with rejection after rejection from the conservative juries of the Salon de Paris art exhibition, a group of artists, including Manet, Degas, Sisley and Cezanne, took matters into their own hands. In 1874 they organised their own show to a mixed critical reaction. One critic's mocking review drew on Monet's Impression, Sunrisefor its headline: "The Exhibition of the Impressionists." The name stuck and soon the young upstarts soon established themselves as a popular and serious movement in the art world.

The Met's collection brings together dozens of key works of the 19th century, such as Ingres's Odalisque in Grisaille, Manet's Boating, Seurat's Grande Jatte,Monet's La Grenouillere, and Gauguin's la Orana Maria/Hail Mary.

A standout amid the wallfuls of landscapes, fruit and flowers is the dazzling Johanna von Orléansby Jules Bastien-Lepage. Courbet, Degas and Monet have their own rooms and, rounding out the exhibition, are nine sculptures by August Rodin including his famous Burghers of Calais. "We have wonderful works here, many back in Europe for the first time since they left," said Peter Raue, head of the Friends of the National Gallery that drummed up the show's €8 million costs. "It's so exciting to see familiar works in a new context. For the first time in Germany, perhaps in Europe, we have a perfect collection on display of an entire century of art from 1810 to 1910." Displaying so many outstanding works in one place for a limited time has drawn the visitors in droves.

It's the second blockbuster exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie, following on 2004's popular "MoMA in Berlin", which offered 200 modern masterpieces from New York a temporary summer home.

Some Berlin critics have sniffed at this "greatest hits" approach to art and some visitors have complained at the huge crowds pushing their way through the exhibition. But most see this as a small price to pay to see these masterpieces without jet lag. Already 300,000 people have seen the works, and another 300,000 are expected before the works return to New York in October. "We've never had so many inquiries in the run-up to an exhibition opening, it's quite extraordinary," says Katharina von Chlebowksi, project manager at the Neue Nationalgalerie. "The French are popular here, that's for sure."

Berlin wasn't always so open to French impressionists. In 1896 Hugo von Tschudi, then director of the Nationalgalerie and an admirer of the movement, clashed with Kaiser Wilhelm II over plans to acquire some more impressionist works. "Please no violet pigs," snorted the Kaiser. The museum director departed for the more liberal artistic environs of Munich shortly thereafter.

•The Met in Berlin runs until Oct 1 at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamerstr 50, 10785 Berlin, www.metinberlin.org .