‘Monet and London: Views of the Thames’: The High Point of Impressionist Painting
A review of ‘Monet and London: Views of the Thames’, at the Courtauld; 2024.
In 1874, a group of French artists put on a display. Monet, Renoir, Degas and others were dismayed by the strict rules of the Salon, a state-sponsored exhibition, and chose to show off their work independently. The exhibition included Impression, soleil levant, a hazy dawn harbour scene rendered by Monet with loose brushstrokes. It was neither polished nor detailed. As the critic Louis Leroy put it, it was ‘sketchy’, and in the journal Le Charivari he mocked the artists for their style. Their works, he said, were mere impressions, not fully formed art. They looked hurried, and weren't worth of serious appraisal.
Those artists took that insult and ran with it. They became the Impressionists, whose critique by Leroy in fact captured what they wanted to achieve. Their aim was to render fleeting, sensory experience — pictures of moments — instead of detailed depictions of reality. The name stuck, and Impressionism, conveying innovation, expression and a break from tradition, became one of the most lauded styles in art’s history. Leroy’s mockery is now remembered as an ironic misstep made in the face of a revolutionary movement that changed the way artists think about light.
Their aim was to render fleeting, sensory experience — pictures of moments.
One of the high points of Impressionism and of the trajectory of its founder came when Monet went to London. In February 1900, he took a suite of rooms on the 5th floor of the Savoy Hotel and used one as his studio. He found the play of fog and smog and light and water on the Thames thrilling, and tried over a period of years to capture what the Savoy calls the ‘panorama from Battersea to the Tower Bridge’ in all of its manifestations. This is the subject of Monet and London: Views of the Thames, now showing at the Courtauld. Two dozen canvases give visual expression to Monet’s declaration that ‘I so love London! It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth’.
The paintings capture an artist working at the height of its powers. The wrapping of the London fog around the city’s landmarks created a peculiar palette of colour that presented a challenge for the artist, then nearing sixty. The fog, he said, ‘assumes all sorts of colours; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs.’ Monet made several visits to London and the Savoy to paint this scene, expanding his initial vision to include not just Waterloo Bridge to the east and the new bridge serving Charing Cross to the west. A series of paintings of the Houses of Parliament, with the setting sun falling behind like a red ball of fire, are the stand-out pictures of the display. But arguably the greatest technical accomplishments are pictures like ‘Waterloo Bridge, Overcast Weather’ or ‘Waterloo Bridge: Sunlight Effect’ in which the gradations of colour—in the sky, on the Thames, across the cityscape—are far more subtle.
A series of paintings of the Houses of Parliament, with the setting sun falling behind like a red ball of fire, are the stand-out pictures of the display
To us moderns, smog evokes dirt, suffocation, hidden harms and damage to the natural world. But in Monet’s day, smog meant industrialisation, and industrialisation meant progress. London was the centre of the world, with its chimneys belching out thick black pollution all day, every day but for half a day on what Monet called ‘the damned English Sunday’. For Monet, then, the paintings captured not just the play of light and air he found intoxicating but progress, time-slices of a city and a culture that were, if you like, going places, rushing towards the future. Pollution was the badge of the forward march. The Great War, which came just fourteen years after Monet first took out his suite at the Savoy, forced upon the English and everyone else a reconsideration of the meaning of progress and technology. As Orwell put it in ‘You and the Atom Bomb’:
‘We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality.’
Here was the darkest side of industrialisation which, at the turn of the twentieth century, could still be enjoyed by visitors to London. As to the city’s inhabitants, the more quotidian harms had long been perceived already, in the choking and spluttering, the ‘smarting eyes and irritated lungs’, the ‘blinking, wheezing and choking’, as Dickens put it. But there were also aesthetic concerns at work. Clearly not everyone found the fog and smog as charming as Monet. When Dickens saw smoke ‘lowering down from the chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes’, he suggested that it had ‘gone into mourning’ — for ‘the death of the sun’.
