Art

Monet's Foggy London on Show at the Courtauld Gallery

The exhibition entitled 'Monet and London: Views of the Thames' is open until 19 January, The Courtauld Gallery, London

by Nicol Degli Innocenti

4 December 2024

Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, 1900. Olio su tela

3' min read

Key points

Hotel Savoy
The fog

3' min read

Claude Monet's London landscape exhibition is finally coming to London 120 years late. In fact, the Courtauld Gallery has realised the dream of the French painter, who had organised an exhibition of his paintings in Paris in 1904 and had intended to bring it to the British capital. Monet's project was never realised because the Paris exhibition was a great success: his landscapes were bought by collectors who did not want to part with them to send them to London.

La Londra di Monet in mostra
Photogallery9 foto

For the first time, it is therefore possible to see again a group of paintings that Monet wanted to be seen together. The curator, Karen Serres, spent years tracking down collectors to recreate the Paris exhibition and managed to bring together 21 paintings out of the 37 chosen by the painter in 1904. "Almost a century after Monet's death, this exhibition at the Courtauld fulfils his ambition to bring his Thames paintings back to the banks of the river that inspired them," she explains.

Hotel Savoy

Between 1899 and 1901 Monet, a great Anglophile, had settled at the Savoy Hotel in central London in two rooms on the fifth and sixth floors, turning one of them, overlooking the Thames, into a studio. From the balcony he spent hours observing the river at all hours of the day, from dawn to dusk, in a variety of weather conditions, working on dozens of canvases simultaneously. Often Monet would go out to paint en plein air on the other side of the river.

The fog

The exhibition is divided into three parts, each bringing together the three elements of the London landscape that had most captured Monet's attention: the Thames with Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. What fascinated the painter most, however, was not the architecture but the climate, and in particular the famous London fog.

"Without the fog London would not be a beautiful city," Monet wrote, explaining that "fog makes every building and object grand and mysterious" and that "it has all the colours, black, brown, yellow, green and purple, which are difficult to reproduce on canvas."

The smoke from chimneys and smokestacks - what we now call pollution - was a source of inspiration for Monet, a constant challenge to capture the fleeting moment and depict on canvas the intangible, a moment of the day in a particular light.

Forms lose their solidity and dissolve. His brush turns the Westminster Parliament into a 'mirage', as one critic of the time wrote, while bridges are vague horizontal lines and smokestacks blurred vertical lines. The sky is thick with clouds and smoke, sometimes grey, sometimes purple, sometimes dominated by an orange sun that manages to cut through the smog. These are almost abstract paintings, absolutely radical and innovative for the time.

Monet returned to Paris with over one hundred London paintings. From these he chose 37 for the exhibition 'Views of the Thames', which he organised in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1904, with the intention of bringing it to London the following year. Now those who visit the Courtauld Gallery can not only see the artist's dream realised, but also visit the Savoy Hotel, the Houses of Parliament, the bridges and the places painted by the artist within a few hundred metres of the museum.

Monet and London: Views of the Thames, The Courtauld Gallery, London, until 19 January 2025.