Monet and London

This beautiful volume accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery that will reunite for the first time in 120 years an extraordinary group of Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of London. The exhibition will realise the artist’s unfulfilled ambition of showing the group on the banks of the Thames, just a stone’s throw away from where many of them were created. Claude Monet (1840–1926) is world renowned as the leading figure of French Impressionism, the movement that changed the course of modern art. Less known is the fact that some of Monet’s most remarkable Impressionist paintings were made not in France but in London. They depict extraordinary views of the Thames as it had never been seen before, full of evocative atmospheres, mysterious light and radiant colours. Begun over three stays in the capital between 1899 and 1901, the series – depicting Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament – was unveiled at a landmark exhibition in Paris in 1904\. Monet fervently wanted to show them in London the following year, 1905, but plans fell through. To this day, they have never been the subject of an exhibition in the UK. Monet and London: Views of the Thames will realise Monet’s unfulfilled ambition of showing this extraordinary group of paintings in London, on the banks of the Thames and a mere 300 metres from the Savoy Hotel where most were painted. By presenting the paintings Monet himself selected for his public in Paris and London, it will provide visitors with the unique experience of seeing the show Monet curated and the works he felt best represented his ambitious artistic enterprise – brought together for the first time over a century after their inaugural exhibition. The accompanying catalogue is richly illustrated and includes 21 entries and four original essays that shed new light on this famous series.