An artist’s visit to 19th century London
When we think of Impressionist paintings, we picture sun-drenched landscapes, rippling river scenes, churning seas, and flowers blooming abundantly. But Claude Monet, for one, was inspired by a broad spectrum of images. A current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914, takes us to an urban setting which Monet found exciting to paint.
In fact, as the exhibition’s title indicates, the Thames – that vital artery of the London cityscape – inspired a long list of artists in the last half of the nineteenth century. The American artist, James McNeill Whistler, was among them. Describing the artist’s intimate and exclusive connection to this river, he wrote:
And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poorer buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.
This exhibition offers yet another opportunity for a virtual escape—time-travel to another era and place.
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