I don’t think we quite meet the threshold of being Monet ‘tragics’: a boring or socially inept person, typically having an obsessive and solitary interest.
However—given that we’ve been to his garden at Giverny, and to Museé de l’Orangerie in Paris for the water lily paintings (and would be going again on this trip), that we’ve watched several documentaries, and were now here at The Courtauld Gallery—I can’t deny that we are probably ‘devotees’: a person who is very interested in and enthusiastic about someone or something.
The attraction at the Courtauld was an exhibition of Monet’s impressionist paintings of fog on the Thames, created from three trips to London between 1899 and 1901 and first shown in Paris in 1904…
You’ll never believe the amazing effects that I saw today. There’s no country more extraordinary for a painter, he wrote home to his wife.
Encapsulating a moment of tranquility and poetic beauty that characterises the impressionist movement, wrote the exhibition’s curator.
Monet called it The Effect of Fog, but, in reality, it was pollution: smog. Here’s Charles Dickens’ perspective:
London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking…London was a sooty spectre1…
Sooty soot: mostly from burning vast amounts of coal in homes, but also to power steam ships, steam trains and factories. A consequence of the industrial revolution and the related rapid population growth (from one million in 1800, to eight million in 1900): London was The Big Smoke…
The problems was at its absolute worst in 1900, when Monet was there:
In fact, the word ‘smog’ was coined shortly thereafter: in 1905, by a public health scientist, who could see that it was killing people: bronchitis and tuberculosis were the primary causes of death. But no real action was taken until after The Great Smog of 1952…
So yes, we went to see an exhibition…of paintings…of carbon…in the atmosphere. Because, like sunsets after the Melbourne bushfires, even bad can be beautiful.
Sorry, what was your question? Did I like the paintings? Well, that is a question, isn’t it. I mean, you know, when we actually see something famous—the real thing—how much does that fame influence our response? Would we ever say, Well, here I am, finally, at the Taj Mahal. Underwhelmed. Monet? Overrated.
Of course not. That’d be tragic.
We were transfixed.
Next week: Paint Your Wagon
From Our Mutual Friend published 1864/5
This is cool. I did a lecture once where I got the students to critique this painting (and a Lowry), it took quite a while before they clicked that we were talking about air pollution and health effects :) it was fun!
I never knew that's where the term,"the Big Smoke" came from for a city...!