London’s South Bank is these days unrecognisable from how it would have looked in the late 19th century, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. Back then, the area now dominated by the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre was “a crush of factories billowing filth, smoke and steam from giant chimneys, accompanied … by a cacophony of animals and machines”.
The hellish scene was a source of great inspiration to Claude Monet, who visited three times between 1899 and 1901 and painted dozens of pictures of the view from his room at the Savoy hotel. A successful exhibition of 37 of these works was staged in Paris in 1904, but his plans for a second showing in London never materialised: most of the paintings had been sold and buyers were reluctant to part with them.
Now, 120 years on, The Courtauld Gallery has finally realised Monet’s ambition. Its new show brings together 21 of his Thames views from collections “scattered across the world”, reuniting them “just a couple of minutes’ walk” from where they were created. Hung together across the two main exhibition galleries, the works feel both “incredibly familiar” and uncannily odd: “no reproduction can recreate Monet’s brushwork”. The result is a “revelation”.
The paintings gathered here “capture effects of light refracted through London’s peasoupers” exquisitely, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. For Monet, the weather conditions created by atmospheric pollution in the city were “as dramatic as the aurora borealis”, and while his “misty, mysterious” visions of London may owe something to Turner and to Whistler, they are “gorgeous” nonetheless. He makes the Houses of Parliament – depicted from across the river – look “as magical and insubstantial as a palace in fairyland”, while the surface of the Thames is animated by “fluorescent streaks” of “sage, turquoise” and “salmon-pink”. When the factory chimneys themselves make an appearance, they pop up “wraith-like” through the gloom.
Seen together, these works, painted “in large, broad strokes, layer upon layer of iridescent colour”, form a “symphonic whole”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. The “majesty” of each is enhanced by its neighbours, and the artist’s “exceptional sensitivity to minute atmospheric nuances” is brilliantly showcased. Five “dynamic” views of the then-new Charing Cross Bridge see it turned into a “weightless” phantom, variously disappearing into mist or illuminated by “light-streaked steam from passing trains”. One view of Waterloo Bridge, meanwhile, transforms the traffic over the thoroughfare into “dabs” against “a lilac blue haze”. These “pivotal and original” pictures “render city life as we experience it as ephemeral, fugitive, blurry moments”. Monet and London is an “enthralling and immediate” show, which immerses us in his “spectacular vision of the city”.
The Courtauld Gallery, London WC2. Until 19 January