Monet at the Courtauld Gallery review: this groundbreaking show comes to London at last

This is quite something: a recreation of one show by Monet that happened 120 years ago and the staging, at last, of another he’d planned that never happened at all.

In 1904, 37 of Monet’s series of paintings of the Thames, made between 1899 and 1901, were put on show in his art dealer’s gallery in Paris. They attracted rave reviews.

He planned a follow-up show in London, but he never quite managed it. The buyers of the pictures from the Paris show wouldn’t give them up for the exhibition, and it all got too difficult. So, this is the nearest we’ll probably ever get to the groundbreaking Bond Street show that never was.

The curator, Karen Serres, has brought together 18 of the original paintings from the 1904 show in Paris and added a further three pictures. So we’re seeing for the first time in London a group of pictures that were always meant to be seen together.

They’re notable studies in themselves but together give an atmospheric account of three places and one river: views of the Thames at Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges and the Houses of Parliament seen in different lights.

Bringing together a group of paintings that speak to each other – same subjects, different conditions – is an achievement, and even better is that it’s happening at the Courtauld, a five-minute walk from the Savoy, from the sixth and fifth floors of which he painted many of the pictures, and another five minutes from the Thames itself and the views he depicted.

Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames, 1903 (Monet/ Alain Bassett)

There are few exhibitions where you can so immediately walk from picture to subject. Even the views of Westminster, painted from a vantage point inside St Thomas’s Hospital, are just down the road.

But alas, it’s not the same view. Because of a succession of clean air acts and the sad demise of coal fires and the even sadder demise of manufacturing in London, we simply don’t have the fog and murk that gave the city such charm from Monet’s point of view. He probably wouldn’t have come here at all if it were as it is now: too much clean air.

In a number of letters he describes his enchantment with the climate in general and the smog in particular: “The fog assumes all sorts of colour; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs”.

Later he observed, “Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.” On the days, mostly Sundays, when there wasn’t any fog, he was sunk in gloom, but as soon as the kitchen fires lit up, the haze came down and he cheered up.

As studies of actual bridges and buildings, the pictures lack definition to the point where in some cases the notional subjects can barely be discerned at all; the contemporary critic that described the view of Westminster in one picture as “an oscillating mirage of a palace” was right.

But representation of bridges and buildings was not what Monet was about; he was trying to pin down the impossible, a kind of light, usually diffused or hidden, in which the smoking chimneys or the bridges or the towers of Westminster, would emerge from the gloom or be suddenly illumed by sunshine.

Clear sunshine is a rarity, which is why Waterloo Bridge: Sunlight Effect, is so exhilarating, but repeatedly we find a glowing orange sun reflected in the fiery waters or dominating the evening sky. (He never painted night scenes, on the basis that Whistler had got there first.)

People do feature in the pictures, but only dimly in dark boats, or even more dimly as commuters on omnibuses making their way across Waterloo bridge as little patches of light.

Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, 1903 (John R. Glembin/ Monet)

The bridges are useful horizontals; the Westminister towers and the smoking chimneys useful verticals. These aren’t, like his paintings of Rouen cathedral, buildings seen throughout the day; rather, he painted particular places at particular times – Westminster later in the afternoon, for instance.

He would paint directly onto the canvas and he would move from one to another according to the way the light changed, trying to seize the appropriate picture to capture a particular effect. It was an almost parodic Impressionist exercise except it took on industrial chimney stacks and commuter omnibuses rather than haystacks.

George Moore, the Irish novelist, was startled to observe dozens of canvases in his room, with the artist moving between them only to find, five minutes later, that the light effect had changed. The pictures were finished off in his studio back in Giverney where he would recall the scene and harmonise the effects.

Monet had an affection for London since his first visit to the city during the Franco-Prussian war. And London was certainly aware of him, though it was not until the first couple of decades of the 20th century that Impressionism really caught on here.

It’s interesting to speculate how the critics would have received that exhibition, showing the Thames to London. Now, 120 years on, we get the chance to see much of it for ourselves.