Monet & Architecture review – glorious pleas for humanity show Monet in a new light

National Gallery, London
He is known as a joyful painter of lilies and picnics. But this thrilling show recasts Monet as an artist aghast as the world hurtled towards calamity

In 1918, an artist who was in his late 70s gave the French state a spectacular gift. Claude Monet, who happened to be an old friend of the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, offered a series of dizzying paintings of his waterlily pond as a national symbol of peace, to mark the end of a murderous world war. To this day, they hang as he intended in enfolding elliptical spaces at the Orangerie Museum in Paris.

This gesture always puzzled me, until I saw the National Gallery’s game-changing exhibition of one of the world’s most joyously accessible artists. It seemed so strange that Monet – the thoughtless painter of fleeting light, the hedonist recorder of bourgeois picnics – should make such a serious public statement. How many visitors to the Orangerie even connect his sensuous lilies with the slaughter of Verdun?

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