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Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames

Aesthetic watershed

The dancing wavelets of the River Thames and light refracted by its encompassing smog gave impressionism a palette that is celebrated in an exhibit of art by Monet and others.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 16, 2005

[Images from the Museum of Fine Arts]

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, London, oil on canvas, 1901-1904, from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

	Monet’s London: Show information, related links and continuing coverage
	Alvin Langdon Coburn, Houses of Parliament, photogravure, 1909, from the Museum of Fine Arts.
	David Roberts, The Houses of Parliament from Millbank, oil on canvas, 1861, from the Museum of London.
	Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, Reflections on the Thames, oil on canvas, 1901-1904, from the Baltimore Museum of Art.

It's lucky for us Claude Monet didn't want to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. To dodge the French draft (in his defense, he had already served a stint in Algeria), he made his first trip to London in 1870, when he was 30.

The term "impressionism" had not yet been coined. But the trip marked a seminal moment for the artist, who would return to London much later to create a great opus that is the centerpiece of "Monet's London: Artists' Visions of the Thames, 1859-1914," opening today at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

Though Monet is its star, the exhibition is not solely about impressionism. Of the 150 works in it, 30 of them paintings, 12 are by Monet; others are by artists who were fellow impressionists, such as Camille Pissaro, along with earlier artists whose styles were more realistic and later ones who were more modern, such as Andre Derain. Along with paintings are vintage photographs, prints and drawings. All take the Thames as their inspiration.

By 1870, Monet was already established as a leader among a group of rebel Parisian artists who would be dubbed impressionists by a sneering critic.

But the London trip moved Monet along his chosen path in important ways. There he saw for the first time the work of an earlier rebel, J.M.W. Turner, and probably met the American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler, both of whom would have a powerful influence on Monet's work. They validated Monet's interest in atmospheric effects and in capturing the fleeting, subjective moment, neither of which were conventional, accepted preoccupations for French artists.

During that visit, Monet also found a subject perfect for exploring the vagaries of light: the River Thames. The Thames was the broad thoroughfare cutting through the world's greatest commercial city. London life centered around it; boats of every kind plied its waters, and factories grew up around it. But the Thames and the air that hung over it were filthy with pollution. An especially perilous moment in 1858 was dubbed The Great Stink; journalists and politicians railed against the smell and the smog that enveloped the river. But that same vapor - the smog, not the stench - created effects that veiled much of the river's hardscrabble realities. The misty, mysterious atmosphere through which sunshine slanted in vague rays looked poetic to Monet and some of his contemporaries.

Other artists had famously captured the river on their canvases for decades, fascinated by the immensity of its bustle. Most of the English painters working in Monet's time strove for pictorial accuracy. Around the time of Monet's visit, Whistler was producing a series of etchings titled the Thames Set that would be enormously influential, inspiring artists to use the river as a subject more contemplative than documentary.

Many artists, Monet and Whistler among them, were beginning to realize that a new medium, photography, could record a physical scene better than a painting or an etching could. For Monet, the river became a perfect vehicle for his aesthetic. The constantly changing light and its modulations on the constantly changing water were embodiments of his preoccupation with subtle coloration and surface effects.

When Monet returned to London almost 30 years later, in 1899, to begin a series of paintings of the river that would eventually number more than 100, much had changed in Monet's life. His fortunes and his reputation had risen, while impressionism as a movement had played itself out. After years of financial hardship, he was living in prosperous domesticity at Giverny, his style admired and emulated. He had survived many of his contemporaries, and those who remained - Cezanne and Pissarro, for example - had evolved in other directions. He was the final, greatest torch-bearer of impressionism, the movement considered to be the beginning of modern art.

Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840, but his parents moved to a smaller town, Le Havre, when he was 5. He showed an early talent for caricatures, but the landscape painter Eugene Bodin, whom he met in 1858, steered him to plein-air (out-of-doors) painting. He decided to pursue an artistic career, which meant returning to Paris. When Monet arrived there in 1859, at age 19, the Academy of Fine Arts and its members - artists mostly - were the arbiters of success. To be considered critically important and worthy of collectors, an artist needed the Academy's stamp of approval, given through space in its prestigious Salon exhibitions. To get there, you had to attend the right school and have the right teachers, who would guide you to acceptable subjects and technique.

It was a stodgy, conservative group, at that time roiled in bickering between its anointed master, Ingres, a neoclassical painter who revered rigorous formal composition, and Delacroix, a romantic painter who favored grand sweeps of color and emotive, passionate subject matter.

Not surprisingly, Monet identified more readily with Delacroix. He and his peer group, which included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, were fascinated by light and the way it modulated color and form. Their interest in "surface," in the effects of painting rather than the story told by it, in subject matter that was of the moment rather than timeless, grand or historic, was radical. But they were not alone. Edouard Manet, a bit older than Monet, was already causing a stir. Across the channel, so was Turner.

At that point, Monet's subject matter was generally in the realist tradition. It's now hard to believe, but Claude Monet was not a popular artist when he began showing his works in Paris during the mid 1800s. He and his band of brothers were brought together not so much by aesthetic principles or a desire to foment change as by being Academy rejects. Even though they held a number of anti-Academy exhibitions, none of them ever stopped applying for admittance to Academy shows. Eventually, they all were.

Within decades, the public, too, embraced the artists loosely called impressionists, though the label originally was applied to participants in a much maligned exhibition in 1874 by an unimpressed art critic who appropriated the term from a Monet painting, Impression: Setting Sun.

Impressionism's popularity, then as now, lies in its accessibility. It is representational for the most part, undeniably beautiful, technically sophisticated and yet asks very little intellectually of the viewer. That was its point.

Those are about the only generalities that can be made about impressionism. The young artists who were part of that group shared no unified aesthetic or philosophical principles. Some painted landscapes and still lifes, others the human form. Some concentrated on plein-air, others were studio artists.

The war and subsequent political upheaval in France were not the only reasons French artists began flocking to London in the early 1870s. They saw a lucrative opportunity in wealthy English collectors who were not as intimidated by academic strictures. Unlike Paris, London offered more outlets for exhibitions and welcomed artists from other European countries and America. Following Whistler were Winslow Homer and Childe Hassam, who became one of the greatest authors of American impressionism.

Monet's first paintings of the Thames were far from the final, celebrated series he exhibited in 1904 after other visits to the English capital during the late 1890s. Unlike those gorgeously modulated views of the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges, the early ones - which don't appear in the St. Petersburg show - are darker and more representational. But Monet clearly appreciated the fleeting, renegade lessons the Thames had to teach him. His work was developing along the lines of Manet's famous and controversial "patches of color," which resembled flat planes of paint laid down like a mosaic. Eventually, his short, brisk brushstrokes would be liberated almost entirely from representation.

Impressionist art often appears spontaneous and unstudied. It never was. All of the painters eventually grouped together as impressionists worked and reworked their canvases and no one more than Monet. Though he began the 1890s Thames series painting directly from what he saw from his balcony at the Savoy Hotel, he took those 100-plus canvases back to Giverny to finish them over many long months. He chose 35 to be shown in 1904 at his longtime dealer's gallery, Durand-Ruel, where they were a hit.

As celebrated as Monet was during the early 20th century, art moved on. Well before his death in 1926, Van Gogh, Gauguin and a group of young turks were breaking fresh ground in their interpretations, while suffering their own deprivations. London had lost its allure as an exciting new subject. A series of soft, impressionistic watercolors by the American artist Joseph Pennell from 1910, also in the exhibition, have a nostalgic quality to them.

But Monet at 80, his eyesight and health failing, continued to elaborate on his impressionist canon. After completing the Thames work, he began his water lilies series, monumental murals that were the culmination of a lifetime's observation of nature and understanding of color. They are a clear herald of the modernist movement, great expanses of color more than subject matter, all surfaces, but such deep ones that their layers of paint defy deconstruction. The world continues to get lost in them.

-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

PREVIEW: "Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914" opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, and continues through April 24. Museum hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday except to museum members. Admission: $12 adults, $10 seniors and college students with ID, and $5 children ages 7 to 18. No advance ticket sales. Group rates are available. Call (727) 896-2667.

Today at the museum at 3:30 p.m., John House, a distinguished scholar of Monet and author of an essay in the exhibition catalog, will deliver a lecture, "Paint and Pollution: Monet's Thames Series in Context." The lecture is free with admission to the museum.

For more information, related links and continuing coverage, go to www.sptimes.com/monet

[Last modified January 13, 2005, 17:18:58]