Monet and London: Views of the Thames

Industrial pollution is imbued with celestial light in Monet’s extraordinarily atmospheric paintings of the Thames. This is an exhibition not to be missed

Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1900-03 (detail). Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 92 cm. Hasso Plattner Collection.

The Courtauld Gallery, London
27 September 2024 – 19 January 2025

by VERONICA SIMPSON

The view from the Savoy hotel suite 618 is spectacular: sunlight rippling across the surface of the River Thames, on a bright June morning. The rare privilege of my gaining this sixth-floor vantage point is all thanks to Claude Monet (1840-1926), whose Thames paintings were latterly sketched from this very room, to be fleshed out later in his Giverny studio, north of Paris. The press has been invited to admire this view, and to glimpse a few of the paintings that resulted from Monet’s visits, before the opening of the Courtauld gallery exhibition.

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, veiled sun (signed and dated Claude Monet 1903), 1899-1903. Oil on canvas, Private collection. Photo: © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

Monet was fascinated with the Thames: he made sketches of it on more than 100 canvases during three long visits, focusing on Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges and the Houses of Parliament, though only about 40 became finished paintings. He was already fond of London, first visiting in 1870 as a penniless artist, with his wife and son, fleeing the turbulence of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. But 30 years later he was a wealthy and celebrated artist, making four more trips to the city between 1898 and 1901, and staying at the best hotels. His 1898 stay was at Grosvenor House, but it was when he landed at the Savoy a year later, in November 1899, that his Thames series began. At the time, London was the marvel of the “modern” world, broadcasting its place at the centre of the industrial revolution by inserting, among its cathedrals and palaces, the belching chimneys of factories, spewing out foul, coal-fired plumes. Monet was inspired by the sulphurous miasma of yellow and orange, the smoky greys and lilacs emitted by these tall chimneys, and the weird effects of this pollution released into the atmosphere. He found the light magical, particularly in winter when smoke combined with clouds and fog. How times and sensibilities – and, thankfully, pollution levels – change. “Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” is Monet’s headline quote from the introductory text.

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, 1900. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence.

And, goodness, these paintings are things of wonder. Twenty-one of his Thames portraits are clustered in two intense rooms on the top floor of the Courtauld, with the institution’s impressionist and post-impressionist treasures displayed in the surrounding galleries. Set against appropriately smoggy, grey walls, the light effects are near miraculous.

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Overcast, 1903. Oil on canvas, Ordrupgaard, Denmark. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

The first room plunges us straight into the industrial murk of Waterloo Bridge, Overcast Weather (1900). It was painted from his Savoy balcony, and he is clearly captivated by the whisps of grey emanating from the South Bank’s thrusting chimneys. But he also finds heavenly pinks and peach colourings in the clouds floating above the Thames. He reproduces with great vigour the golden glow of carriage lamps from horse-drawn traffic clustered on the bridge (a different Waterloo bridge structure to the one we have today), reflected in the murky Thames. While it is an almost identical view, there is a complete shift in atmosphere in the adjacent picture, Waterloo Bridge, Morning Fog (undated). The scene is rendered almost celestial, filled with pastel blues, pinks and greens. He told a journalist in 1901: “The fog 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 … My practised eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere.”

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, 1903. Oil on canvas, Milwaukee Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Photo: John R. Glembin.

More theatrical still is the painting that comes next: Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog (1903). There is just the haziest outline of a bridge and shore in this dense, grey scene, with hints of purple. But bursting through that smoky veil is a glowing disc of reddish orange, its neon tones reflected skilfully on the water. A similar moment is captured in the adjacent painting, Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames (1903), but the thick, greenish tinge to the cloud surrounding the orange sun – also reflected in the river - feels almost diabolical.

Claude Monet, London, Parliament. Sunlight in the fog, 1904. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Photo © Grand Palais RMN (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

A painting that seems more smoke and clouds than anything else, almost like Turner at his most abstract, Charing Cross Bridge (1902) is paired on another wall with a work from a year later, Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames (1903). Between the two, it feels as if we are transported from thick fog-scape to the moment when the clouds clear, sun bursts through and lights up the whole scene with an effervescent dazzle in almost implausibly sherbet hues.

Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames, 1903. Oil on canvas. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, Image © Lyon MBA – Photo: Alain Basset.

The Courtauld has done a great job in choreographing such essentially similar works, and in lighting them to capture the upper edge of each thick streak of white or pale paint through which Monet renders the movement and flow of light on the water. It is almost holographic at times: the light effects shifted magically as I moved slowly from the left to the right of this second Charing Cross picture.

There are moments when Monet’s palette lurches almost towards the chocolate-box, becoming ethereal and pastel-pretty. For example, there is a sickly sweetness in the dominant pinks and yellows of Charing Cross Bridge (1902). Should we doubt the veracity of Monet’s astonishing eye? It’s true that, to grasp each moment of extraordinary colour and cloud, he rattled through his on-site sketches, finishing them later – many of them in 1904, to ready them for their first, Paris exhibition (hence the dates of the paintings rarely correspond to the visits). But the ecstatic letters from those who later bought these paintings, and their feeling of being transported to the Thames, implies he was spot on.

Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London, 1904. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, \St Petersburg, Florida. Image: Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida.

The second room is where we encounter the Houses of Parliament series, for which Monet crossed the river and secured permission to paint this elaborate, Victorian-Gothic confection from a private terrace of St Thomas’s hospital. Rather than foreground Big Ben – as famous then as it is now – he concentrates on the left section of the building, magnifying the drama of its roofline in dense pea-soupers, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight or, most moodily, as the sun sets. They are extraordinarily atmospheric. Parliament’s crenelated facade looms as if emerging directly from the water. In a particularly spectral version, clouded in mists of pale blue, grey and violet, two figures in small boats captured in the foreground look like ghostly boatmen sailing across the underworld’s river Lethe – The Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog, London (1904). In others, the fiery orange orb of the sun, circled by red-tinged fog, and reflected on the river, seems almost nuclear, definitely apocalyptic.

The energy and vigour in these paintings is remarkable. It is as if you can feel Monet’s excitement as he works on them. And it is fascinating to compare them to the studied tranquillity of the pictures in the next room, Antibes (1888) and Autumn Effect at Argenteuil (1873). There the brushstrokes are gentler, calmer, smaller.

These Thames works are a brilliant feat of memory, all of them completed in his studio, 37 of them finished for the 1904 show in his Paris gallery, which was a huge commercial and critical success. He had hoped to repeat the exercise a year later in London, but struggled to orchestrate the loans of paintings that had already been purchased and dispersed after that show. It’s remarkable that the Courtauld has managed to secure 18 pictures from that series for this exhibition. It feels as if we are genuinely seeing the show that Monet would have liked us to see. Yes, it’s more than 100 years later, but just 300 yards away from the site that inspired them.