Monet’s luminous London paintings at the Courtauld are a tonic for grey days

“I can’t tell you about this fantastic day,” Monet wrote to his wife Alice from London’s Savoy Hotel on February 3 1901. “What marvellous things, but only lasting five minutes, it’s enough to drive you crazy. There’s no land more extraordinary for a painter.”

Monet’s fifth-floor suite looked west towards the wrought-iron Charing Cross Bridge that carried trains across the river, and east to Waterloo Bridge’s stone arches decorated with Doric columns. In pale sun they changed continually as winter mist mingled with smoke from the south bank’s factories and furnaces. In the evenings, Monet crossed the river to paint the Houses of Parliament, dissolving the ornate Gothic buildings into ghostly twilit melodramas.

For an artist whose work turned on pursuing transitory effects, London half obscured by fog was tantalising. From three London visits, Monet took home some 100 canvases, spent years making them a cohesive group, then chose 37 for a triumphant Paris show in 1904. Plans for a London exhibition fell through. Now, over a century later, it is taking place, just metres from the site where he painted: the Courtauld Gallery’s tremendous Monet and London: Views of the Thames gathers 18 works from the original show — borrowed from museums globally — to immerse us in his spectacular vision of the city.

It’s enthralling and immediate, a London modern yet mysterious, grand, unstable, always luminous: soft, muted morning light in “Waterloo Bridge, Grey Weather”; smoggy yellow-tinted “Charing Cross Bridge”; buildings, water, sky fused in flaming sunset in the tour de force “London, the Houses of Parliament, Shaft of Sunlight in the Fog”. The show occupies only two rooms, but feels more expansive. Painted in large, broad strokes, layer upon layer of iridescent colour, Monet’s sweeping river and big skies thrill to London’s vibrant flow of life.

At the start, five dynamic paintings depict Charing Cross Bridge: its sheer span on cylindrical piers, geometric and stark, forms an anchoring diagonal even as Monet destabilises the structure into weightless phantoms. In “Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames”, it gleams against the sunlit river; in “Charing Cross Bridge, Fog on the Thames”, it disappears, pencil-thin, into mist. Light-streaked steam from passing trains illumines the daring (and in 1904 unsaleable) “Charing Cross Bridge, Smoke in the Fog; Impression”: the tremulous grey bridge between a rose-violet sky and its reflections, water and air merging in drifts of paint.

For Waterloo Bridge, cavernous vaults play as dark shadows and undulating patterns, animated by buses and carriages. With smoke unfurling from the south bank, and the verticals of chimneys contrasting with the arches, “Waterloo Bridge, Morning Fog” has an all-over purple glow. The industrial backcloth is barely perceptible in “Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog”. Sky and river are tinged pink by the rising sun, mirrored as impasto orange ripples; silhouettes of boats slowly heave into sight.

One morning Monet told Alice, “the sun rose so blindingly one couldn’t see it. The Thames was only gold. God it was beautiful, so good that I set to work in a frenzy following the sun and its shimmers on the water” — Milwaukee Art Museum’s “Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect” captures such a glitter. By afternoon, in “Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun”, it is the arches and dabs of vehicles that are lit against a lilac blue haze; the thickly worked surface suggests the heavy atmosphere built up over the day.

Monet believed “it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives subjects their true value” and that “without the fog London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.” He relished the pollution that London’s inhabitants loathed, and was despondent on Sundays when the factories closed and there was “nothing which excites the nerves”. Among the most nervy paintings, Denver Art Museum’s “Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect”, curling with arabesques of a steamer’s white-grey puffs, was returned by collector Sergei Shchukin because his wife disliked the industrial smoke.

Seeing the paintings together makes clear Monet’s ambitions for them as a symphonic whole, the majesty of each enhanced by the others, and also his exceptional sensitivity to minute atmospheric nuances. His friend Gustave Geffroy recorded visiting the Savoy with Georges Clemenceau when Monet stopped painting as the view became shrouded in “colourless obscurity”, then suddenly he “snatched his palette and brushes again. ‘The sun is back’ he said, but at that moment he was the only one who knew it. However intently we looked, we saw nothing but that muffled grey space”.

Monet especially evokes light in darkness in the Houses of Parliament paintings, theatres of special effects, towers like spectres emerging from or vanishing into a velvety blackness as day turns to night. Each is subtly different: in two entitled “Houses of Parliament, Sunset”, for example, Krefeld Art Museums’ version has myriad blues, greens and mauves in broken touches; the one held by Potsdam’s Museum Barberini is veiled in sumptuous red violets. Hung to cast its radiance across both galleries, the latter is the most expensive London picture ever sold — $75.9mn in 2022.

Leaving the Courtauld, walking a few paces to Waterloo Bridge, you sense how Monet’s heady colours, abandoning strict representation, transform the everyday, now as then. (His final visit coincided with the capital plunging into black for Queen Victoria’s funeral, for which his guide was “an American writer, speaking French admirably, explaining everything . . . his name is Henry James”.)

But Monet’s shifting vistas also render city life as we experience it, as ephemeral, fugitive, blurry moments. His series paintings, depicting the same subject in different atmospheres, are about time as well as places, and memory, synthesising visual recollections into chromatic harmonies.

At the Savoy, shuffling his numerous unfinished paintings to find one “not too different from what I saw” at a particular moment, Monet despaired that he “got lost” in his canvases, and resigned himself to “doing the real work in the studio”. Taking years to refine the painted impression of an instant was paradoxical, and liberating: far from his subject, he balanced his response to the observed city with a new abstracting freedom.

Monet was 60 in 1900, and the London series ushers into his painting characteristics of late style — extravagant yet authoritative, emotional, meditative, musing on the abstract character of reality. The Thames’s spectral bridges were also his own bridge to the future: he brought the amplitude and splendour of London’s watery reflections back to the little pond in his Giverny garden, magnifying it in his mind after his London experiences as he began the monumental, abstracting Water Lily series in 1904. The Courtauld allows us to see the London pictures as pivotal and original. They will brighten the city all winter.

September 27-January 19, courtauld.ac.uk

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