Aside from the occasional street name, or wharf long since given over to bars and cafes, the industrial past of London’s South Bank is now almost entirely obliterated. When in 1899, the French painter Claude Monet first set up his easel on the balcony of his suite at the Savoy, the view across the river now dominated by the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the National Theatre was a crush of factories billowing filth, smoke and steam from giant chimneys, accompanied, you can only imagine, by a cacophony of humans, animals and machines. It sounds like hell, but for Monet the city’s magic mix of winter fog, sun and pollution was irresistible, and he wrote to his wife Alice of “the amazing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at this river Thames”.
The resulting series of 37 paintings called Views of the Thames was unveiled in Paris in 1904 to such acclaim that Monet’s ambition to bring the exhibition to London the following year was largely scuppered by the sale of nearly all the pictures, from which the owners then refused to be parted. Now, 120 years on, Monet’s ambition has finally been realised at the Courtauld Gallery, where for the first time 21 paintings – until now scattered across the world, and not seen together for generations – have been reunited just a couple of minutes’ walk from the Savoy Hotel. Three subjects interested Monet : from his vantage point at the Savoy, the view east towards Wat.
