While Monet’s work is often celebrated for its exquisite portrayal of light, there is a slight, though significant, imprecision in the praise. What distinguishes his paintings from those of Pissarro, Morisot and his other Impressionist peers is their conviction in the annihilating potential of sun-soaked air, which Monet sees as key to comprehending the ephemerality of form. The world is a mesmerising mirage. Through the lens of Monet’s painting, form – no matter how stony or static, intransigent or inert – is fungible. It fights for survival.
On first seeing a display of Monet’s London paintings five years later, a US collector and writer attested to the retinal riddle presented by Monet’s enthralling canvases, which seem to reverse the respective concretions of material substance and refulgent air. The urban infrastructures, Desmond FitzGerald explained: “are all so misty that at first the beholder gazes with astonishment at what seems to be a half-finished picture; but gradually, as the eye penetrates the fog, objects begin to come out… The illusion is wonderful, and has never been attempted in exactly the same manner before. The Houses of Parliament shine out of the fog with the colour of old-rose or purple.”
FitzGerald’s insistence that what Monet had seized was at once “an illusion” and something never before articulated by an artist is telling. Introduced into English in the middle of the 14th Century, the word “illusion” is related to “ludicrous” and initially denoted a jeering act of mocking deception. Is it possible that Monet’s mesmeric depictions of the Thames differ so markedly from those of earlier artists because they don’t, in fact, capture his subject as it actually appeared? Are his paintings, in truth, resplendent lies?
‘Light was in the air’
Monet was the first to confess that in order to make London a suitable subject for him to take on, a fabricating Insta-filter was required. “Without the fog,” he remarked, “London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.” The sheer panic that Monet suffered when he pulled back the curtains in his hotel room – to discover the crisp, clean light of a mistless morning – is palpable. “Upon getting up,” he confided to his wife in a letter written in March 1900, “I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even the hint of mist; I was devastated and already seeing all my canvases ruined.” His relief when, “little by little, with the fires lighting up, smoke and mist returned,” only corroborates the suspicion that London, as a place, was all but incidental to his purposes. What he was really compiling weren’t studies of a city but experiments in optics – a pioneering treatise on the undiscovered properties of light itself.