joseph scissorhands: Monet and London: Views of the Thames

Claude Monet (1840-1926) - The Houses of Parliament, 1904

"Every day I find London more beautiful to paint." - Claude Monet.

Another sold-out exhibition in London that I was fortunate enough to secure a ticket for during the festive season. This was a bit of a coup for the Courtauld presenting a series of Monet's impressions of the Thames not far from where they were originally conceived and executed, a mere 300 metres away along the Strand at the Savoy hotel. The curators have done a great job in bringing this selection from the series together from a diverse range of galleries and private collections. Monet's original series of 37 London paintings were exhibited in Paris in 1904 at the gallery of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The paintings were a critical and commercial success with nearly two-thirds of them selling at the exhibition. Monet had planned a follow up exhibition to take place in London in 1905, but his plans fell through as he was unable to create enough further paintings which he regarded as successfully finished. Monet (1840-1926), first visited London when seeking refuge from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He became fascinated with the Thames and the atmospheric effects of the London fogs caused by the increasing industrialisation of the modern city through the buildings lining the river. In one painting you can actually make out the workers on their commute across Waterloo Bridge as the chimney stacks belch out smoke in the background. Monet mentioned plans to return to the city, and indeed did so, with three stays between 1899 and 1901 where he set himself up on the top floor at the Savoy hotel, and from here would paint scenes which focused on Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridges, as well as the Houses of Parliament. He would take back to France over one hundred canvases and complete many of these in his Giverny studio. As with his paintings of Rouen cathedral, haystacks, and waterlilies, it is clear that Monet enjoyed working in series, explaining that the individual paintings 'take on their full value only in the comparison and succession of the entire series', and so it proves in this exhibition. Even though the individual paintings are strong enough to stand alone, the Thames series is more cohesive when presented together, and they afford visitors a good opportunity to compare the artists different views of the river. I couldn't help but notice that a couple of the paintings displayed in the exhibition repeat Monet's pictorial device of featuring an orange sun (or little red ball' as he called it), hovering in the air at the top of his canvases. This device was first seen in his once notorious, but now-celebrated painting Impression Sunrise, 1872, first exhibited at the very first Impressionist/Independents exhibition, and from which the term "Impressionism" was coined. Some of the paintings make a strong case for Monet to be regarded as the forerunner of abstract expressionism. This is particularly evident in paintings such as Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, which is reduced to two hazy, purple/blue fields of colour with impasto strokes of complementary orange representing the suns reflection on the waters surface. Monet was a modernist and quite radical in his work of his late period perfectly illustrated in several paintings here. I have included two of his more typical Impressionist paintings of the French landscape which are part of the Courtauld's permanent collection and visitors encounter on leaving the Monet and London exhibition. One can clearly see the marked difference in intention and stylistic development in his paintings of London. Once again the curators have done a wonderful job in realising Monet's vision and bringing the paintings together for an exhibition in London albeit one hundred and twenty years later.