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Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames

Greatness overflowing

London's Thames comes to life at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts, seen through the eyes of the magnificent Claude Monet and other worthy painters.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 18, 2005

[Images from Museum of Fine Arts]

James Tissot, The Thames, 1876, oil on canvas, from Wakefield Museum and Galleries, Wakefield, England.

	Monet’s London: Show information, related links and continuing coverage
	Claude Monet, Parliament, Reflections on the Thames, 1905, oil on canvas, Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris.
	Andre Derain, Big Ben, London, 1906, oil on canvas, from Musee d'Art Moderne, Troyes, France.

ST. PETERSBURG - What's left to discuss about Claude Monet that hasn't already been said for about 100 years? Nothing, really, except to acknowledge in the presence of a dozen of his works the greatness of his painting.

They range along the yellow gallery walls of the Museum of Fine Arts, part of the magnificent "Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914," take after take of three scenes we've seen before, like big snapshots from a tourist who can't get enough of sightseeing.

But Monet in London was no ordinary tourist, and these paintings are so much more than images recorded to recall a memorable trip. He had, simply, one of the greatest eyes for color of any artist who has ever put pigment to canvas. Compositionally, he was only very good. The bridges - Waterloo and Charing Cross - and the Houses of Parliament by the time he made them in his 60s were props to further his real interest: the play of light and shadow on a surface.

The series - or parts of it, since there are about 100 such images - was meant to be viewed together to invite comparison. But that has happened only a few times, and never in the United States, since the works' first showing in the early 1900s, and we are fortunate to see them as he wished.

The Charing Cross group includes an early one with the spike of Cleopatra's Needle, a famous London monument, rising in the foreground. In the later paintings, Monet dispensed with verisimilitude and obliterated it, believing it added nothing. The painting with the Needle is the crudest of the lot, masterful as it is, tentatively colored and executed. But swing around to one of his Houses of Parliament nearby, cater-cornered to another Charing Cross painting, sparkling with hazy sunlight as a boat chugs across the foreground. (Boats and trains were useful for their steam, unlike Cleopatra's Needle, but not the point, either, and tend to dissolve in their veils of smoke.) In this Parliament, one of four by Monet in the show, buildings are all vertical green slashes melting into the thick swipes of who knows how many colors that resolve into gleaming spots of light borrowed from the swirling mass of filtering clouds above. It's heaven.

And how does he make orange and purple, strident competitors on the color wheel, such graceful partners on another canvas of Parliament? It's subtitled Effects of Fog, but fog has never been so plummy, nor the fiery ball of a setting sun it masks so tenderly muted.

The only thing to do is enjoy such plenitude. Then settle down and proceed with the rest of an exhibition that has much to give. The Monets are in the large front gallery, and seeing them first is like getting to eat dessert before dinner. But the next courses served up are grand and worth saving room for.

Chief curator Jennifer Hardin purposefully reversed the feast - she could have left the Monets to a final oh-wow moment at the end - to further the real star of the show. It's the Thames River, that mighty commercial highway slicing through London and the bearer of wealth and poverty, beauty and misery.

Artists before Monet had taken note of those contradictions; the presence of some of them bears witness to their influence on Monet. The pre-eminence in that regard is James McNeill Whistler. His Thames Set is grouped in a corner of the same gallery housing the Monets; the prints, in their quieter way, are just as sumptuous. Whistler, a contemporary and friend of the French impressionist, had urged Monet to visit London, which he did for more pragmatic reasons than mere friendship. France was on the brink of war in 1870, and Monet didn't want to be conscripted. But going to London opened Monet's eyes to more gritty scenes than the pastorales he was exploring in the French countryside.

Whistler had recently published his Thames Set, etchings that would influence artists for the next 50 years. Seeing them now, we're tempted to ask, "What was the big deal?" These prints are engravings, a laborious process that had fallen from favor as lithography, so much easier and cheaper, gained popularity in the 19th century. Whistler demonstrated to a generation of young artists untutored in engraving its potential for evocation rather than straightforward documentation. Whistler chose as his subject the working class parts of the river. In the most innovative, he borrows from the Japanese aesthetic that pits void against mass. Black Lion Wharf, like the others, dated 1859, shows a laborer in the foreground, resting in a docked boat. Everything else in the foreground is sketchy and becomes even more so in the middle ground, where the river is a flat expanse of blank paper, identifiable as water only by the boats on it. The background, in contrast, is an excruciatingly detailed jumble of old buildings.

In Vauxhall Bridge, he gets really funky, blocking our view of the distant bridge and a boat sailing by with the "X" of cross beams of a boat on which the artist is obviously standing. Some critics assailed them as not photographic enough, but Whistler was going for a startling, modern vision of representational art.

The exhibition includes a later series Whistler did, in the 1890s, about the time Monet was in London painting his series. (Monet, in fact, was said to have stayed in the same room at the Savoy occupied by Whistler because the balcony view was so felicitous.) But these etchings are elegiac in tone, and even sparer. He stayed in his room, drawing what he saw from it while his wife slowly died of cancer. He drew her, too, reclining on a chaise, wrapped in blankets, wistfully looking out the French doors.

After these, a celebrated Whistler Nocturne, in an adjacent gallery, is almost an afterthought. The painting, smaller than most other Nocturnes, is a dark wash of midnight blues punctuated by a reddish flare. It holds pride of place between two galleries devoted to other artists who drew on his example for their own inspired versions of the Thames: prints by Bertha Jacques, Francis Seymour Haden and the prodigious Joseph Pennell, who also has a suite of watercolors; a small watercolor by Winslow Homer, said to be the only painting he did of the Thames during his London stay in the 1880s; two paintings by Childe Hassam; and a mass of photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, who liked to describe himself as "the Whistler of photography." He earned those bragging rights with his haunting, dark photogravures so artfully composed and cropped.

The Thames story proceeds around the emoting Monets and Whistlers. Prints, paintings and photographs document the vast building program of new bridges and the embankments, broad walkways bordering the river (think Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, only much longer and wider) that transformed the Thames beginning in the mid 1800s. Larger oil paintings, some superb, some really good, by James Tissot, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Frank Myers Boggs and F.A. Winkfield record the bustle with greater bravado. But whether they give it an iridescent sheen, as does Boggs, or a fade-to-black gloss, as does Winkfield, they all view the Thames without the tinted shades of idealization worn by Monet. A gray day is a gray day and polluted water is just that, they seem to agree, and their forays into atmospheric effect are in service to representation rather than its own justification.

The final gallery has the appropriate coda, paintings by artists who embraced the impressionist brand of special effects and went even further with them. Georges Lemmon, the only Belgian painter in the show, represents the neoimpressionists in a pointillist river scene that somehow is more an exercise in technique and misses greatness. Henri Le Sidaner's soft-focus take on St. Paul's Cathedral from the Thames side is a beautiful large-scale postcard. Richard Hayley Lever injects some American muscle into impressionism with London Docks, painted over a 10-year period beginning in 1901.

But Andre Derain comes close to stealing the show, or at least the curtain call, with fauvist paintings he made at the behest of his Paris dealer in 1906 after the success of Monet's exhibition. His Thames is shockingly mutable with color, rather than Monet-muted. Above a blue Big Ben, the sun is a fireworks display shooting many-hued sparks into a green sky. London Bridge is the same pea green as the water, bridge pilings are orange or pink, and roofs are bright red. By this time, we're ready for Derain's whirling dervish. We do not recoil from such fluidity. We dive into it. The Thames, we have come to realize, can carry all cargo.

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

"Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, 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 members. Group rates available, but no advance ticket sales. Admission: $12 adults, $10 seniors and college students with ID, and $5 children ages 7 to 18. Call (727) 896-2667.

[Last modified January 17, 2005, 16:25:06]