‘Only an eye – but my God, what an eye!” said Cézanne of Monet. But no artist is only an eye. Posing as an innocent, unquestioning painter of the light that came to him gave Monet a helpful privacy, a professional facade, behind which he could explore wild poetic thoughts. His early masterpiece Impression, Sunrise presents itself as a simple view of dawn in the Le Havre docks, but it’s a Romantic meditation, as tentative and emotionally growing as a Wagner prelude. Shown at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 it became an icon of this movement’s passion for painting reality, fast. It was only when Monet visited the Savoy Hotel in London three decades later, as the Courtauld shows in 21 paintings in two very intense rooms, that he rediscovered other, buried artistic ambitions in the weird smog-filtered light of late Victorian and Edwardian London.
One of the most compelling canvases here is called Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, and it restages Impression, Sunrise. An intense orange sun sends blazing streaks of red slashing through the ethereal ripples of the Thames beneath a fuzzy fog tinged with bronze: as we make out the forms of boats and people, modern life becomes a misty morning dream.
By revisiting Impression, Sunrise on a foggy day in London, Monet was rethinking his entire artistic nature. Everyone thought they knew what impressionism was – they still do: a movement that captured the pleasures of modern French life in dappled scenes of people picnicking, partying or swimming, deliberately eschewing depth in favour of the shimmering surface of life. But couldn’t impressionism be about more? So I picture Monet musing in his Savoy room.
In repeated visits between 1899 to 1901, this passionate painter of beauty came to London to experiment with ugliness. He had never in his life taken his brush to anything as unattractive as the British capital in a pea-souper. The metropolis’ light at the smoggy dawn of the 20th century was poisoned by pollution from industries that crowded the banks of the Thames. His Waterloo Bridge, Overcast Weather has as many giant chimneys as a Lowry. Monet claimed he adored the London light, but this and other paintings prove he understood what made it so peculiar: the polluted wealth of the world’s first industrial nation.
These paintings have no sense of the classic impressionist theme of urban leisure. While Parisians dance, drink and promenade in impressionist art, Monet’s Londoners don’t appear to have any time for it. Workers cross Waterloo Bridge endlessly, in painting after painting, or are ferried in smoke-belching commuter trains in and out of Charing Cross.
Once Monet had made the modern city look like heaven. His paintings of London suggest an urban hell. His repetition of the same views from his hotel becomes itself nightmarish. Each one catches variations in the light. But what light: a shifting palette of yellows, greys, purples, sickly and macabre, always filtered by fog and smoke.
French artists had seen London as hell before. Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1872, peers with horror into its slums. Paris was imagined as a city of the senses. London was the grimy pit of the new capitalist world’s callousness. So is Monet, picturing this city from his hotel, a smog tourist?
No, because his eye meets its match. He is painting what he sees and most of it is fog. Vague forms of buses, people, trains struggle to become real, to be seen. Smoke gets in his eyes. The distorted, eerily coloured light becomes a thing in itself rather than a way of illuminating objects. The unreal city changes his art, as he loses his way in its smog.
Monet’s paintings from his hotel represented a phase of struggle as he tested the way London’s smoke changed perception itself. Sometimes they didn’t quite come off. So he took his easel to St Thomas’s hospital where a doctor friend offered him a workspace from which to paint the Houses of Parliament. There, he left 19th-century realism behind for ever.
In London, The Houses of Parliament, Shaft of Sunlight in the Fog, nothing is real. The sunlight from a shattered gold orb breaks into infinite rays of pink and violet, lighting the fog from within, before exploding in shards on the oceanic Thames. The blue silhouette of Westminster floats in the irradiated mist: it is Dracula’s castle, or an opera set. If he’d hinted at Wagner in Impression, Sunrise, here he goes full Ring Cycle, filling the misty, sun-drugged sky and water with slowly rising, mysterious notes.
Then you notice the wildest thing. Parliament does not stand on solid ground. Waves of paint sweep its sides as if it were a ship at sea. You also see there’s no up nor down either: purple reflections in the Thames invert the gothic towers.
Monet had one of the most brilliant late periods in the history of art. His water lilies would mourn the first world war’s dead and inspire abstract impressionism. This exhibition makes a strong case that it all started here. It lets you see the moment a great artist became a great modernist. It was the filthy light of London that helped him see beyond the visible.
• Monet and London. Views of the Thames is at the Courtauld Gallery, London from 27 September 2024 until 19 January 2025
