Monet's London

More than one hundred years ago, the French Impressionist Claude Monet exhibited his long-awaited series of London paintings, Vues de la Tamise (Views of the Thames). This series marked Monet's return to urban themes after a period of several decades, and it was his first attempt to paint London since he had been there as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71.
The London series resulted from three separate painting campaigns from 1899 to 1901. Monet stayed at the elegant, recently constructed Savoy Hotel, where he had a suite of rooms with a balcony view of the Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges on the Thames. While he concentrated on these two bridges during his first stay, he added the Houses of Parliament on his second trip, thanks to the American painter John Singer Sargent, who secured permission for him to paint them from the vantage point of St. Thomas' Hospital across the river. Staying a few months for each visit, Monet would return to his home in Giverny with his unfinished canvases. He then took an additional three years to complete the almost one hundred canvases in the series.


Nearly sixty years old when he began the series, Monet was already a successful and sought-after artist who nonetheless continued to search for new subjects that challenged his eye and his art. The London paintings embody the paradoxes of his work: the wish to record instantaneous notations of a transient effect while at the same time acknowledging the laborious process that was required to produce them. As he had once said about his series paintings: "I'm becoming so slow in my work that it makes me despair, but the further I go, the better I see that it takes a great deal of work to succeed in rendering what I want to render: 'instantaneity,' above all the enveloping atmosphere."




By the time he painted the London series, Monet was searching for qualities that allowed people to "live for longer" with his pictures, seeking to portray both the moment that was the starting point of the picture, and the idea of the subject, which evoked a completely different temporal sensibility. In a letter written during his second stay in London, he said he realized that some of his paintings, though he thought them almost finished, were "not London-like enough," and required "some bold brushstrokes" to bring them into line with his idea of London.
Monet used color with an increasing freedom in these later years. London as he saw it again at the beginning of the present century suggested chromatic richnesses far beyond any he had contemplated in 1871. This view of the Houses of Parliament in 1904 with the sun coming through fog departed from the Whistleriean silhouette of thirty-three years before to picture densities of purple and blue with a contrast of gold that already forecast André Derain's fauve paintings of the city.
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All of these paintings were done on identical sizes of canvas, from the same viewpoint overlooking the Thames from Monet's window. This series is the supreme expression of his conception of an "envelope" of interactive colored light. By providing a static subject under different light conditions, the series paintings illustrate how the changing "envelope" transforms what we perceive. This final painting of the series, however, differs from the first seven. It is titled without the additional clause used in the others to describe the momentary condition of the envelope, such as "...Sun Breaking Through the Fog" or "...Effect of Sunlight". In the earlier works, the buildings and river are inert, passively affected by the envelope of light Here they take center stage with fantastically dynamic form. The spiraling brushstrokes of the tower sweep it upward majestically, seeming to draw contrails of the envelope into its vortex. The river, too, takes on a more aggressive aspect, the highlighted wavecrests creating a groundswell at the base of the tower that contributes to the rising effect. As the tower stretches toward the bright sky at the very pinnacle of the canvas, Monet succeeds masterfully in expressing a dazzling sense of supreme aspiration.