Exhibition review by Peter Clossick PPLG
Another stupendous exhibition in town is “Monet and London, Views of the Thames” at the Courtauld Gallery from 27 September to 19 January 2025. Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) represented up-to-the-minute expressions of modern times exemplified through his use of colour, and these paintings with the colour of water, objects and buildings through the fog. My immediate impression of walking into the two small rooms of the exhibition is one of the effects of haze and obscuration, with line, shape, and colour capturing the moment.
Monet first visited London in 1870 to avoid being called up to fight when the Prussians invaded France. He was impressed by Constable’s and Turner’s paintings, mainly how they depicted the skies. He followed with three more sojourns in London in 1899, 1900, and 1901, where he painted from the 6th floor with a balcony at the Savoy Hotel. The hotel had promoted this view of the Thames River. He also managed to arrange and paint views of the river from St Thomas’s Hospital.
In 1900, London was the largest city in the world, and coal pollution was undesirable but rife. I remember my mother (born 1912) saying they had to walk in line in the pavement gutters to and from work, unable to see due to the heavy fog. Monet used this effect, giving a sense of faded splendour, shifting light and fugitive motifs, reflections on water with dissolving shapes, and a soft and romantic rhythm in the clouds. He dealt with three main series, Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, with Big Ben increasing in height to cathedral-like proportions, giving off a religious quality and taking rapid on-the-spot notations with paint and pastel, which were then finished in the studio from memory and imagination to enhance the fleeting effects of the appearances of nature, capturing visual and emotional truth. Loose impasto painting effects from the general to the particular with no hard edges, no black, but alizarine, yellows, viridian Greens, cobalt Blues, warm greys, whites and violets creating an amalgamation of atmosphere. To translate a sensation and realise a mood with an infinity of colour contrast to reconstitute light oscillating between invention, exaggeration and imagination toward concrete beauty with astounding technical skill.
When Monet was 16, he sold caricature drawings in Le Havre for 15 francs each. In 1866, he exhibited the painting “Camille” in the French Salon, claiming he did it in four days when, in fact, it took him four months. Camille, his wife, died at age 32, and in 1874, the critics criticised the first “Impressionist” exhibition as nothing but wallpaper. Although initially poor, Monet was extravagant, borrowing money from friends such as Renoir and Manet, taking from one to pay back another. In 1884, he married Alice, and by 1891, at age 44, he was wealthy, well-supported by collectors and earning up to 50K francs a year through sales.
Half the works in this exhibition were displayed in Paris in 1904 and were supposed to come to London, but this never happened. This exhibition encapsulates this lost opportunity to display these works together for the first time in the city where they were created.
Could you see this thought-provoking display and not draw delightful conclusions about what is possible on a two-dimensional surface with coloured paint – from such a fantastic artist?
Peter Clossick PPLG 2024
Monet and London. Views of the Thames
27 Sept 2024 – 19 Jan 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3
The Courtauld Gallery