Monet and the Infinite Variety of Fog

There are conflicting versions of the origins of the word Impressionism, describing the mid-19th century movement of mostly French painters, who were to change modern art forever. They exhibited together for the first time in 1874, in a cramped space above a photographer’s studio on Boulevard des Capucines. Some say the word came from the title of a painting by the group’s most innovative member, Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. Others attribute the term to a disparaging review of that exhibition by a critic who dismissed Monet’s work as “sketchy, giving only the impression of things and not an accurate likeness.” The group embraced the name, and there were seven more “Impressionist” exhibitions over the next ten years.

If you’re looking for a visual definition of the word, look no further than the exhibition at The Courtauld, which has the most comprehensive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the country—Degas to Seurat, Renoir to Gauguin, Cézanne to Van Gogh. For this exhibition focusing on just one of them, however, the curators have cast their net worldwide to tell the story with paintings that haven’t been displayed together for over a century, and never in this country. Only three of the paintings here are from The Courtauld’s own collection; the loans are the result of a four-year search by the exhibition’s curator, Karen Serres.

In broad terms, the Impressionists were searching for ways to represent an impression of light in paintings made largely in the open air, but there was so much more to Monet. He would paint the same scene over and over again to capture the revolving nature of his subjects, at different times of the day, in changing weather, in different seasons, recording how impressions could be transformed by changes in the atmosphere.

“More than any other Impressionist artist,” says Karen Serres, “Monet was very attentive to how his works were displayed. With his series paintings, he created a whole visual experience from multiple canvases of the same subject, what we would call today an ‘installation.’ The Courtauld exhibition presents Monet’s paintings as he wanted them to be seen.”

This series by the mature Monet emerged nearly thirty years into his career, in which time he had struggled for recognition, before this cycle at last established him as France’s leading painter at 60. He visited London largely to paint the famous fog, which in winter, engulfed our capital city from the traffic fumes and the sulphur belched into the atmosphere from chimneys on both sides of the Thames. He came to London three times between 1899 and 1903, creating a body of 37 paintings that focused on just three sites – Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament.

Monet exhibited them in Paris in the spring of 1904 in the gallery of his agent, Paul Durand-Ruel, and it was a phenomenal success. One critic wrote, “This spring 1904… sees the definitive recognition of Monet.” He intended to exhibit them in London in 1905 but was unable to borrow back enough of the paintings sold in the original exhibition. So, 120 years later, this is the first time they have been seen as a developing group, as Monet intended, where they could “take on their full value only in the comparison and succession of the entire series.” There are 21 paintings here in two rooms, plenty to make his point.

He was fascinated by London’s “extraordinary fog, so very yellow,” and Monet set himself up a couple of hundred yards from where the exhibition is, on a top-floor balcony of the Savoy Hotel close to Waterloo Bridge, to capture “some fog effects.” It was the first of three extended visits.

“It has to be said,” he wrote to his wife Alice, “that this climate is so idiosyncratic you wouldn’t believe the astonishing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at the river Thames.”

He brought 100 canvases back to his studio at Giverny for finishing but almost two-thirds were discarded.

Monet’s free yet precise brushstrokes give us some of the infinite variety of the Thames and the architecture on its banks as he watches and hurries to capture what he sees, before the scene has moved on, “…wonderful things, but none lasting more than five minutes, it is enough to drive one mad. No, there is no country more extraordinary for a painter,” he told Alice.

These pictures can be seen as a culmination of a stage in Monet’s long career – he was to live to be 86 – and the sun he began with still had a transforming influence in many of the images. In the last painting in the exhibition, there is a hint of where his mind was going next. In Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect of 1903, the shadow of the bridge is retreating into the mists, while the waters emerge in the foreground to take prominence for the first time, a hint of what Monet would concentrate on after London: water lilies.

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