Monet and London: The Courtauld’s ravishing show is worth the 120-year wait

According to the 19th-century French painter Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, his fellow artist, was “only an eye – but my god, what an eye!” Visiting this outstanding exhibition of 21 views by Monet of the River Thames – misty, mysterious panoramas, in which the Houses of Parliament appear as magical and insubstantial as a palace in fairyland – you understand what he was getting at.

With a pleasing palette dominated by purplish blues, these ravishing paintings capture effects of light refracted through London’s peasoupers. For Monet, the thick sulphurous haze of lung-choking pollution that enveloped Britain’s imperial capital every winter was a “delicious” source of fleeting vaporous enchantments as dramatic as the aurora borealis.

Bedazzled by the fog’s optical phenomena, he painted atmospheric light shows beside the Thames over three long campaigns between 1899 and 1901. From the balcony of his upper-floor suite at the Savoy – a stone’s throw from the Courtauld (which nails it with this tight show, curated by Karen Serres) – he depicted the old granite Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge’s new-fangled iron structure. He also crossed the river to represent the Palace of Westminster from a covered terrace of St Thomas’s Hospital.

Although an exhibition of 37 of his pictures held in Paris in 1904 was a hit, plans to bring the series to London fell through. Almost 120 years later, some have now made it over; astonishingly, this is the first time these views have been the focus of an exhibition in this country.

Painting fog on the Thames could be stressful. Monet, who paid closer attention to fluctuations in the British weather than Michael Fish, kept scores of canvases on the go, frantically adding a few touches only when the meteorological conditions, which could pass in a flash, were just right. Eventually, he schlepped his “loose experiments” back to Giverny, to finish them in his studio.

The results aren’t altogether original: other artists, such as JMW Turner and James McNeill Whistler, had already fashioned wonderful, poetic paintings of the Thames. Yet, they are 100 per cent gorgeous – and various. In some, a sense of the bustle animating what was then the world’s most populous city is apparent: horse-drawn double-deckers cram Waterloo Bridge; barges, steamers, and sailboats flit about the river. In others, the metropolitan hubbub recedes, and Monet presents only half-glimpsed architecture, seemingly floating amid an ethereal fog, like a mirage, or something out of one of his beloved Japanese prints.

Homing in on Parliament’s Victoria Tower, he silhouettes and elongates the neo-gothic Palace of Westminster so that, with spires and turrets like twitching ears, it has the alert presence of a pack of wild, watchful creatures. Fluorescent streaks animate the river’s choppy surface, reflecting the glowing gobstopper of a setting sun (which the artist called “the little red ball”). The Thames appears by turns sage, turquoise, salmon-pink.

Despite such retina-pleasing prettiness, there’s a strangeness and modernity to these paintings of “effets de brouillard” (fog effects) that, because of Monet’s overfamiliarity, it’s easy to miss. He wasn’t making a point about the wickedness of heavy industry, but wraith-like factory chimneystacks are nevertheless prominent. Offset by a lilac flourish signifying the steam of a locomotive, the predominant yellow in a phantasmagorical vision that once belonged to Winston Churchill seems almost toxic.

Perhaps Cezanne was being snotty. For visual candyfloss, Monet’s paintings are surprisingly unsweet.

From Sept 27; information: courtauld.ac.uk