Smog, glorious smog: how Monet saw through London’s poisonous wealth

The Frenchman was transfixed by the light he saw in the polluted city. But his misty painting of Waterloo Bridge, about to go under the hammer for an expected £24m, was anything but romantic

Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Effet de Brume is going for a song. I’d say £24m, the minimum price Christie’s expect for this almost minimalist masterpiece, is cheap, at least by the standards of the nutty art market. If an Andy Warhol is worth more than £158m, and a Picasso nearly £103m, what makes a great Monet less valuable? It seems you need modernist edge to smash the market these days. Yet this work has it in spades, right down to Monet’s nod towards the climate crisis.

Monet loved the dirty town that was Victorian and Edwardian London. One reason is in the title of his painting: “Effet de Brume” means “fog effect”. Or given the atmospheric problems of London at the time: smog effect. Coal fires, industrial chimneys and belching steamers on the Thames created that misty, weird light that kept Monet coming back to the Savoy Hotel, where he painted this view in 1904.

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