'Unmissable': the Earl of Clancarty reviews 'Monet and London. Views of the Thames'

1903: Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames, by Claude Monet | Image courtesy of: Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, Image © Lyon MBA – Photo Alain Basset

Earl of Clancarty

@NickClancarty

Even today, it is difficult to get one’s head around the idea that the French Impressionists painted this side of the English Channel at all, so identified are they in people’s minds with the French landscape. Yet, ironically, Claude Monet’s paintings of the Thames in central London greatly furthered his reputation in France through the exhibition of 37 of them in Paris in 1904.

Monet’s visits to London around the turn of the 20th century were not the first to England. Britain provided a safe haven when he, Camille Pissarro, and other of the Impressionists arrived on our shores many years earlier as refugees from the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. Would such unknown and penniless artists from Europe wanting to stay and work for the interim be allowed to do so in the UK of today? Catch Pissarro’s painting Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich – part of the Courtauld Institute’s own collection – on your way into the current exhibition. Monet painted in a similar style at the time: it provides a measure of the huge distance travelled in the development of their work in the intervening 30 years. 

Remarkably none of these paintings were completed in London

One of the exciting things about this small but intense – and unmissable – exhibition is that it is being shown just a stone’s throw away from where many of the paintings themselves were executed. Walk back to Parliament along the Embankment and there is (the later structure of) Waterloo Bridge on the left and Charing Cross Bridge on the right, the two views that make up the paintings in the first room of the exhibition, but seen from the higher angle of the sixth floor of the Savoy Hotel where Monet turned rooms into a studio. The second room of the exhibition is devoted to views of the Houses of Parliament seen from a covered terrace in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital.

Remarkably none of these paintings were completed in London but finished at Monet’s home in Giverny. In London, Monet would work on a number of paintings at the same time, moving from one to another as the light changed. Yet each painting also seems to possess a distinct mood which feels personal, and they vary in the amount of detail described. One of the sketchiest, Charing Cross Bridge, was gifted in 1949 to Sir Winston Churchill by his literary agent, Emery Reves, who hoped Churchill, then leader of the opposition, would be able to “dissipate the fog that shrouds Westminster”. Yet it was the then prevalent ‘peasoupers’, the sulphurous London smog, that most interested Monet. Without the “mysterious cloak” of fog – as Monet himself described it – London would not have been so beautiful.

Finally, take a particular look at the painting The Houses of Parliament (number 21 in the exhibition) that in some ways is the odd one out, having been worked on further for an intended London exhibition of the Thames paintings that never materialised. It is the most dynamic painting in the exhibition, a harbinger of things to come – including the Abstract Expressionists who were so influenced by late Monet. 

Earl of Clancarty is a Crossbench peer

Monet and London. Views of the Thames
Curated by: Dr Karen Serres
Venue: The Courtauld Gallery, WC2; until 19 January 2025

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