Monet and London review – genius lurks behind the capital’s filthy light

Courtauld Gallery, London
Between 1899 and 1901, this passionate painter of beauty came to Britain’s polluted capital to experiment with ugliness. Through the smog emerged a great modernist

‘Only an eye – but my God, what an eye!” said Cézanne of Monet. But no artist is only an eye. Posing as an innocent, unquestioning painter of the light that came to him gave Monet a helpful privacy, a professional facade, behind which he could explore wild poetic thoughts. His early masterpiece Impression, Sunrise presents itself as a simple view of dawn in the Le Havre docks, but it’s a Romantic meditation, as tentative and emotionally growing as a Wagner prelude. Shown at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 it became an icon of this movement’s passion for painting reality, fast. It was only when Monet visited the Savoy Hotel in London three decades later, as the Courtauld shows in 21 paintings in two very intense rooms, that he rediscovered other, buried artistic ambitions in the weird smog-filtered light of late Victorian and Edwardian London.

One of the most compelling canvases here is called Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, and it restages Impression, Sunrise. An intense orange sun sends blazing streaks of red slashing through the ethereal ripples of the Thames beneath a fuzzy fog tinged with bronze: as we make out the forms of boats and people, modern life becomes a misty morning dream.

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