Fog on the Thames

and other cultural joys in London this week and beyond

Charing Cross Bridge, 1902 by Claude Monet, on display at the Courtauld

Whenever I cross one of London’s many bridges - on the bus, especially, which is an excellent way to appreciate the city - it always puts a smile on my face. What a beauty she is, I think, every time I look downriver at the silly mess of the City of London skyline, or up towards the magnificence of the Westminster. Even if sheeting rain is pocking the surface of the roiling river, I think it’s glorious.

Apparently my rose-tinted view was shared by Claude Monet, whose stunning series of views of the Thames, made on three visits to the capital between 1899 and 1901, are on display at the Courtauld Gallery in its new show Monet and London, from tomorrow until January 19, though his had more of a yellow-violet hue. 

“It has to be said that this climate is so idiosyncratic; you wouldn’t believe the amazing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at this river Thames,” he wrote to his wife, Alice, and later, “No, there is no country more extraordinary for a painter.”

Admittedly the London Monet experienced was made so extraordinary by the pea-souper fogs that hung heavy over the river during the Industrial Revolution - he swooned over the striking visual effects it created (he’d struggle to see the beauty of it now, I fear, in the relative clarity of the contemporary age) but what he created from that lung-coating period is dreamy in the extreme. 

In Charing Cross Bridge, Fog on the Thames (1903), you feel you can see the fog shifting slowly in the gentle breeze over the water. The vivid coral sun in Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog (also 1903) is just stunning, while The Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog, London (1904) is a symphony in violet, its imposing subject almost obscured by the light effects wrought by the thick air between it and the painter’s easel (on a private terrace at St Thomas’s Hospital, on this occasion).