2024-10-27 17:13:00
Claude Monet was an iconic French painter of the 19th century who changed the art of painting with the Impressionist movement and made us see London as we never imagined, through his own eyes.
The influential artist went down in history as one of the most important representatives of the Impressionist movement, which brought a revolutionary approach to painting. With his fast and free strokes, he managed to capture the natural variations between light, color and atmosphere on canvas, giving a realistic sense of space and time. Basically, he was the man who denatured… illusions. He was able to turn static pictures into something alive and dynamic!
Impressionism Claude Monet “brought life” to London
London was also influenced by Impressionism and was the greatest representative of this artistic movement. Claude Monet was the painter who captured an entire city in about 100 canvases … almost alive, with misty pictures of the River Thames. It was a different artistic perspective that came to make a significant change in the way artists look at London.
The visual exhibition “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” by Claude Monet: When light, fog and architecture bring things to life and the river Thames and London come to life on canvas
The exhibition Monet and London: Views of the Thames explores how Claude Monet’s revolutionary, misty paintings of England irrevocably changed the way we see London. Monet visited London three times between 1899 and 1901, and created almost 100 paintings through which he shows us how he saw the city with his own eyes, focusing on the atmosphere of the city, which was covered in fog and toxic smoke. 
These paintings not only depict the architecture of London, they play with the properties of light. Monet was not looking for the truth of the city, but the visual experiences offered by the changing light conditions. The painting “London, Houses of Parliament, Opening Sunlight in Fog, 1904”, is characteristic as it shows the towers of Parliament emerging through a curtain of fog, as they are reflected and heated by the sun’s rays. 
Monet, during his second stay in London in 1901, this time painted from a terrace in St Thomas’ Hospital. At first, he had started from the seventh floor of the Savoy Hotel, where he watched the magical interaction of the morning light with the bridges of the Thames. These paintings show the deepening of Claude Monet’s artistic understanding, as they are decorated with a variety of colors, from those created by nature, and with a different consistency of mist density each time. 
Monet stands out for his ability to capture the power of light, which distinguishes him from other Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot. The artist perceived light not only as a source of illumination, but also as a means of rejecting form from objects. His art presents the world as a charming illusion, where things “struggle” to survive through changing light.
The effect of fog in Claude Monet’s paintings
Monet’s perception and conception of London was influenced by his own need for fog. As he argued “without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city”, seeing it as the element that gave the capital of the United Kingdom a grandeur befitting its architecture. The lack of fog disappointed him, as he revealed in a letter, as he believed the pictures would be a disaster without it. 
Monet’s need to draw attention to the London landscape through fog coincided with the time when the German physicist Max Planck (the father of Quantum Theory) was making discoveries about the nature of light as a quantum of energy. Due to the artistic current of Impressionism that Monet brought to the painting, which emphasizes the cloudy and “polluted” landscape, the disturbance in the way one perceives light and reality came.
Oscar Wilde, in the same year that Monet began the Thames and London series of paintings, referred to the phenomenon of fog, arguing that art has the power to shape our perception of reality. These works by Monet, with their imaginative use of color in the fog, influenced the way London was understood and recognized for its beauty and grandeur. 
Comparing Monet to the English Romantic landscape painter William Turner further emphasizes the revolutionary nature of his approach. While Turner used light as a divine force that brought forth the world, Monet turned it into a tool to give substance to reality. Filled with the ethereal beauty of fog, Monet’s paintings overturned previous visual perceptions of London and created a new reality of how one perceives the beauty of this city, which emerges through a misty curtain thanks to the sun’s rays gives her substance.
The exhibition “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” is located in the Courtauld Gallery, one of the most important art museums in London. The works of the great painter will be on view until 19 January 2025. The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to explore this transformation and discover how Monet’s paintings defined the modern perception of the Thames and London. Claude Monet’s works combine light, fog and architecture and cast an “alien” light on the city, perhaps never to be seen again.
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