This Gallery of images was inspired by an important London art event. Twenty one of Claude Monet’s paintings of London have been shepherded together for showing in a Thameside space, only yards from where they were painted. This reunion, “Monet and London”, running to January 19th 2025 at the Courtauld Gallery, shows the paintings he made between 1899 and 1901.

What was the London he saw in those years?

Using our graphic collections for the years around 1900 we can look directly over his shoulder as he stood before the Thames, applied paint to his canvas - or impatiently waited for the light and atmosphere that he wanted.

But we do not necessarily get to see the London that Monet saw.

Starting with a birds-eye-view and a map to establish the size and character of the metropolis in the years when the nineteenth century slid into the next, we swiftly move on to look at the three London vistas that were his obsession.

Two of the subjects are what he would have seen from his bedroom on the sixth floor of the newly built (1887) Savoy Hotel on Victoria Embankment. It was a well- chosen location. Comfortably established, he could choose to look almost straight ahead to Waterloo Bridge (built in 1817, and since replaced) with the chimneys of industrial Lambeth rising behind it (sometimes including the constant traffic of people and omnibuses crossing the bridge). Or by swivelling a little to his right he could take in the sweep of the river westwards down the embankment, towards the Charing Cross Railway and Foot Bridge (built in 1864, now substantially altered and known as Hungerford Bridge).

The last of the three vistas was the only one that required that he leave his bedroom, and the gallery will explore the view from St Thomas’s Hospital on the Lambeth bank where he sat on the hospital terrace gazing directly across to the Houses of Parliament.

All of the images that you will see in this Gallery are from the time of Monet’s London visits, or very close. But only a very few of them look much like the London that Monet painted. This is why we decided to present them. More eloquent than words, they throw into clear relief the emphasis on the light effect and sensory impact as experienced by Monet. In particular they illustrate the depth of his love for London fog. Letters home record his dismay on waking to find clear and neutral light over the river. In particular he hated the London Sunday, when the closure of the myriad workshops and factories would mean that less coal smoke would be darkening the vapours and intensifying the mists.

Sunday was useless for Monet, but for photographers and traditional watercolourists fog-free days were the only way to achieve the results their work demanded. But the gap between the two was slowly narrowing. Monet’s paintings were not exhibited in London but those of Whistler and J.M.W Turner were. All of them loved the Thames and Monet certainly knew the work of his predecessors. Together they started to change ideas of painting the town.

So join us in this Gallery to see Monet’s London…… but not quite as he saw it.

A hardback catalogue of the Courtauld exhibition illustrating and describing Monet’s 1899-1901 London paintings has been published.