London's South Bank is these days unrecognisable from how it would have looked in the late 19th century, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. Back then, the area now dominated by the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre was "a crush of factories billowing filth, smoke and steam from giant chimneys, accompanied ... by a cacophony of animals and machines".
The hellish scene was a source of great inspiration to Claude Monet, who visited three times between 1899 and 1901 and painted dozens of pictures of the view from his room at the Savoy hotel. A successful exhibition of 37 of these works was staged in Paris in 1904, but his plans for a second showing in London never materialised: most of the paintings had been sold and buyers were reluctant to part with them.
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The paintings gathered here "capture effects of light refracted through London's peasoupers" exquisitely, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. For Monet, the weather conditions created by atmospheric pollution in the city were "as dramatic as the aurora borealis", and while his "misty, mysterious" visions of London may owe something to Turner and to Whistler, they are "gorgeous" nonetheless. He makes the Houses of Parliament – depicted from across the river – look "as magical and insubstantial as a palace in fairyland", while the surface of the Thames is animated by "fluorescent streaks" of "sage, turquoise" and "salmon-pink". When the factory chimneys themselves make an appearance, they pop up "wraith-like" through the gloom.
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