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In Our Time
Monet in England
00:50:48
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Claude Monet's fascination with the foggy Thames.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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Jackie Wolschlager
BBC Sounds Music.
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Melvin Bragg
Radio Podcasts this is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello In 1899 in London, Claude Monet looked out on the Thames from his hotel balcony in the Savoy Hotel and began series of almost a hundred paintings that captured the essence of this dynamic city in which fog almost obscured the bridges, boats and parliament. Fog may be too kind a word, as it was mainly smog from the surrounding chimneys, terrible for health, but offering an ever changing light that captivated Monet. There are more Monet paintings of the Thames, none of his water lilies or haystacks or Rouen Cathedral, and they gave him the confidence to explore an art that was more abstract than impressionists. With me to discuss Lord Monet in England are Karen Ser, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, London Francis Fowle, professor of 19th century art at the University of Edinburgh and senior curator of French art at the National Galleries of Scotland and Jackie Wolschlinger, chief art critic for the Financial Times and author of Money the Restless Vision. Jackie, he was born in 1840. Can you take us through the first two or three decades of his life?
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Jackie Wolschlager
Yes. He moved as a child to Le Havre and that was absolutely decisive. It points straight ahead to the London paintings and it gave him, first of all, a lifelong love of the sea and of water and of movement. The way light on water made it look different at different times, the weather and indeed Le Havre's own smog, changing how everything was. And we know how much he loved water from the fact that he painted thousands of pictures of it, and also that it was his great consolation. The tragedy of Monet's early years was the death of his mother when he was just 16, and the sketchbooks just after that find him on the cliffs on the shore painting water. So that was the lifelong influence. And the other thing is Le Havre was A very modern industrial port. It wasn't picturesque, it embraced the new. So when Monet went off to Paris after that, he went with an idea that the modern and new mattered, not tradition. And he got to Paris, really setting out to lead a new sort of modern art. There's a lovely story of him and Renoir and Cezanne and Manet all being given their passes to copy at the Louvre. And the others went diligently and copied religious and historical paintings. And Monet didn't know what to do. And he climbed out of the window and he sat on the balcony and he painted Paris. And from there on, he was a painter of everyday life, of modern life. And he knew that painting had to be different to do that, it had to be fresh, spontaneous, free. And with these loose gestural brushstrokes, he caught the moment as it passed by. And he wasn't trying to do anything finished and complete. He was saying, this is how we experience life, painting. And so that's what he did in the 60s, of course, it went down terribly badly. The Salon, the establishment art, turned him down, and he ended up very poor. And this strange combination of a leader of modern painting but excluded from the imperial establishment. And that's where we find him in 1869-70, painting on the banks of the Seine, painting figures and swimmers and foliage all dissolving in these pools of light, painting the sea, and indeed, In Trouville, in 1870, painting his wife on plein air. And grains of sand on the beach are still in that canvas in the National Gallery.
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Melvin Bragg
Why did he come to London?
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Jackie Wolschlager
He came to London because, as he was in Trouville, the Franco Prussian War broke out. Monet was a modern republican, a democrat. He had no sympathy with the Second Empire, which had launched this war, no belief that it was a just war. And he didn't want to lose his life fighting for something he didn't believe. And so, like many, many other French people, he crossed the Channel to England.
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Melvin Bragg
So London in 1870 was a refuge.
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Jackie Wolschlager
It was a refuge for very many people. It wasn't that they were happy there, but they were relieved not to be in France. Monet's best painter friend lost his life in the Franco Prussian War. Monet was miserable. I think you feel it in the paintings of London. He only managed six or seven in half a year, but he was safe.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Francis Powell. It's fascinating. He comes from this country of light to the smoggiest, most populous, dirtiest, sootiest city in the world at that Time. What was the attraction for him as a painter?
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Francis Fowle
I know it's true, it was a very foggy city. And actually he loved those kind of misty, foggy effects. But you don't really get that impression terribly strongly from the pictures that he produced when one compares them with what the situation was in London at the time. He painted three pictures of the Thames, and he painted in the parks. And the skies tend to be very overcast, and England, as one knows it, very damp and slightly depressing. But he also was interested in exploring these kind of atmospheric effects. The real story is that there were major problems with pollution and these devastating fogs, for example, in 1873. So just after the period that he was there, there was a really den black fog and cattle, the whole herds of cattle that were asphyxiated at Smithfield Market. And many people also suffered as a result of that. The fog kind of came and went, the yellow fog.
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Melvin Bragg
I mean, Elliot picks it up, doesn't he?
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Francis Fowle
Absolutely. And so does Dickens, obviously, as well. It almost becomes like a character in the literature of the period. Certainly in Bleak House. It's got this incredible sort of anthromorphic aspect to it. And this was picked up also by French writers, in particular Mallarme, who was a friend of Monet, and also Hippolyte Tene, who was a historian and philosopher who visited London around the same time as Monet was there. And he published this book called Notes on England, in which he says that London was somewhere where one meditates suicide. And he has these wonderful descriptions of exactly the same kind of sites that Monet was visiting. And he talks. He writes as if he's looking. Looking through the eyes of an Impressionist. And it is quite extraordinary. He talks about how the fog transforms the boats on the river, making them look like spots on blotting paper.
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Melvin Bragg
To what stage is his own skill developed so that he could see in that a subject which he painted more than any other subject.
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Francis Fowle
He certainly produced one of his finest works during that period, which is the painting of the Thames below Westminster in the National Gallery in London. It gives an example of what he was trying to do at the time. He was trying to use the fog in what I describe as a transformative way, a bit like someone like James McNeill Whistler. And he had the example of Whistler. Whistler was an American artist who had studio lived in London. He probably visited him at the time when he was in London. And I think that he learned from Whistler this idea of. I mean, so the Impressionist aesthetic is wedded to the idea of painting precisely what you see in front of you, but then it develops into more the impression, this kind of, you know, what exists between you and the object. But at the time, time in the 70s, he still wedded to this idea of painting, this effect, the effect of fog. And so that's what he's aiming for. In the Thames below Westminster, when you see the Houses of Parliament kind of emerging, they're almost like phantoms, like the buildings, like phantoms or sentinels emerging from the mist. The light and the objects are almost dissolving in the atmosphere. And the way that the sun is setting behind the Houses of Parliament and you have these kind of particles of pink light which are strewn across the landscape and it's. And they're beautiful.
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Melvin Bragg
So after this, this is his first visit to London. Karen. Then he went back to France. Why did he do that?
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Karen Ser
So he was eager to get back, and so he. He didn't spend even quite a year in London. But I think it. London did continue to loom large in his imagination. But, yes, he wouldn't return to paint it for 30 years. But in the meantime, his art developed hugely. And so, crucially, just a year after returning From London in 1872, he paints impression Sunrise, which is a depiction of the port of Lo Havre, a pale sun being reflected in this industrial port. And that painting is famous. It's probably one of the most famous works by him because it was presented at that exhibition in 1874 that he organized with his kind of fellow artist that had been refused access to the artist. Exactly. So they didn't, they didn't even go to the Salon de Refusee. They just decided to do their own thing and they called themselves the independent artists. And it's there that a critic saw Impression Sunrise and decided that he would call them Impressionists. And it was incredibly pejorative, indeed, saying, you know, you're supposed, if you're going to paint a landscape, you're supposed to paint it accurately and clearly and with all the, all the details. I'm not really interested in your feeling about it. But even so, Monet continued, really, in this quest, your personal impression was worthy of art. And that they really felt was very important.
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Melvin Bragg
Is it possible to talk about how he developed over the next two or three decades? I'm trying to bridge the time from he came back From London until 30 years later, he went back to London. So let's try to talk about these three decades.
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Karen Ser
It's a very interesting period because from, yes, from the 70s all the way to the. To the turn of the century. It does see him being little by little, accepted. But what's very interesting about.
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Melvin Bragg
Accepted by whom?
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Karen Ser
Accepted by. Because the Salon is starting to become a bit staid, and so more and more independent exhibitions. There's just an opening of the mind. And by the 1880s, the salon is considered a little bit passe, and it's no longer the absolute kind of last word in art. So he just kind of stayed the course. But what's interesting is that he continues to really challenge himself. And so even though he continues to paint landscape in Normandy and in the suburbs of Paris, he's also seeking different lights and different atmospheres. And so in the 1880s, for example, he travels quite widely. So he goes to the south of France to really, for him, it was a complete discovery of this really sharp light that he just wasn't used to in the north. He travels to the Atlantic coast, to Holland, to Norway. So all of that, you really kind of see him pursuing his studies of landscape and of the. Of the rendering of light. And then in 1890, it's quite a crucial beginning of a crucial decade for him when he starts working in series. So instead of making one painting of a motif, rendering the light at a specific time of day and under certain weather conditions, he decides to make a dozen. Because he feels that that is the best way to get to the truth, he says, to the truth of nature.
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Melvin Bragg
To a dozen views of the doors of Rouen Cathedral and so on.
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Karen Ser
Exactly. Poplars, haystacks. That's really in the 1890s. That's what he dedicates his work to. And indeed, this is where the Thames series comes in at the very end of that decade.
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Melvin Bragg
And also it's becoming a modern art world with galleries, and not just the one painting a year, but galleries and people who represented you. And America came in as a place to sell these paintings, and it opened up in that sense. That was a great help.
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Karen Ser
That's exactly right. It was a completely different field than it had been 30 years earlier in terms of who decided what painting was worthy.
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Melvin Bragg
But 30 years later, Jackie, he couldn't resist the smell, the fog, the clouds, the mist of London. And back he came in 1899. What was that about?
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Jackie Wolschlager
Well, he came, I think, for lots of reasons which converged at that point. As Karen said, he had kept the idea of London in his mind all through the 1880s, but he never really had enough money to. To come and settle there and do anything with it. But then there were two sort of one personal thing. He was by then married to the love of his life, alice. And in 1899 her daughter died. And Alice went absolutely mad and was.
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Melvin Bragg
So grief stricken that, I mean, that's not a throwaway. She became emotionally very distressed.
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Jackie Wolschlager
She was absolutely distraught. And monetary wondered how on earth he could help her, whether she would survive because. And her grief was then lifelong, which is understandable, of course. And he thought perhaps the most helpful thing he could do would be to take her away from given where this had happened to something very different and as busy and bustling as possible and not French. So they went to London and he couldn't really help himself, just taking some, you know, making some paintings while he was there. But that wasn't initially why he went. And then the other thing is that he was making all these series in the 1890s of very symbolic French things. The haystacks and French agriculture. The poplars are a national symbol. Rouen Cathedral was the height of French Gothic. And then in 1897, the Dreyfus case happened. And Monet was just appalled at the divisions in French society. He was appalled at the racism. And he never painted another French site again, except for his garden. And so I think London opened something to him then. And then sort of finally, just a.
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Melvin Bragg
Second, we can't just pass over Dreyfus like that. It's an important fact.
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Jackie Wolschlager
Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a Jewish captain wrongly charged by racist right wing soldiers who had quite, you know, had implicated him unfairly and indeed dishonestly. And the case was bought by Zola, who was one of Monet's friends who stood up for him. Zola was threatened with prison for speaking Jacques Jacqueus. And he also at that point fled to England to safety. And he left behind him just a divided society. And one of Monet's greatest friends was the Georges Clemenceau, who subsequently became prime minister. And Clemenceau published Zola's writings and then supported him. And so Monet was on that side, but his dearest friend Renoir was not. He was on the opposite side. And these, these divisions were absolutely horrible. And Monet just, he looked at France quite differently after that.
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Melvin Bragg
Yes. And so London was up, an escape.
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Jackie Wolschlager
A refuge in some sense it was a refuge. And the, I think the other, the date is also relevant. It was 1899. He'd done his French series paintings. He hadn't painted a City since 1878, apart from the Luan doors. And I think he wanted a new challenge for a new century. And London was it?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, it was the most popular city in the world at that time, wasn't it? Yes, Francis. The light seemed to entrance him. He comes back to London. Can you give us an indication of the power that it gave to him? Well, let's call it the second visit.
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Francis Fowle
Yes. He's still interested in the fog. And the fog, you get the impression from looking at the series, the series of nearly 100 works, that the fog was much more sort of intense at that time. But in fact, the fog levels, the air quality would have been quite similar, partly because, I mean, it had been getting progressively worse because the population was expanding and they started bringing in these measures to counteract the effects. So I think that it's significant that he adopted a high viewpoint. He was on the fifth. He was on the sixth floor initially, and then he moved to the fifth floor the following year. And so he was effectively above the fog and he could look down on it. And he looked. So in the morning, he would look to the left, look east, rather, and he would look towards Waterloo Bridge and the south bank in the distance, and you could see the chimneys and the factories which were causing the pollution which was actually creating the fall fog on that south bank. And in the morning, looking east, of course, he had the sun behind him and he was really interested in the way the sun kind of filtered through the fog. And then in the afternoon, he shifted and looked to the west towards Charing Cross Bridge, and the sun was shifting around at the same time. And then in the evening, he moved, eventually moved across to St. Thomas's Hospital and then was observing the Houses of Parliament from a closer viewpoint. And one of the things about that sort of time of day was that he was getting these wonderful sunset effects. So you see the Houses of Parliament kind of rising up from. Through this incredible, almost like fiery sunset at times and at other times dissolving in the fog. So he was aiming at all these different effects of color. And one of the things he was fascinated about was the way that the fog itself changed color all the time and that the effects, as the sun changed, they were constantly shifting. And in fact, he writes a letter to Alice how. How difficult it is because, you know, one minute he. And this is why he ends up having, you know, so many canvases that he was working on at the same time, because, you know, once one effect shifted, he then rushed about trying to find the right canvas to work on which. Which was going to replicate this same effect. And often was frustrated. So I think he found it. He made it very difficult for himself. But he also, at the same time, was. He was trying to evoke these marvelous effects which he had unfurling before him. And he writes in a very passionate way about it.
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Melvin Bragg
Was he the only one doing this? Was he following a path of his own at this stage? Were people surprised? Look, he was up there painting a fog again.
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Francis Fowle
Well, I suppose Whistler had done it in the past.
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Melvin Bragg
Yes.
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Francis Fowle
It's a different effect, though. And the difference between Monet and Whistler is that with Whistler, he was painting largely from memory. So he went out on the river and he liked to observe the river during the evening.
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Melvin Bragg
And even though Whistler's Nocturnes.
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Francis Fowle
Yeah, Whistler's Nocturnes, exactly. And he was drawing comparisons between painting and writing and poetry and music. But Monet was well aware of his writings, and in fact, he introduced Whistler to Mallarme, who translated Whistler's 10 o'clock lecture into French. And he would have been aware of Whistler's ideals and his aesthetic. And I feel very much that with these later works, he's sitting in front. He's always painting in front of nature, but he's also. I mean, people debate whether how accurate he is, how accurate his renditions of the fog are. And I think to him, it was the aesthetic effect. I mean, it is the effect. It's how he sees it. But this aesthetic effect became more important, and I think I'm justified in saying that, because he then took them back to Giverny and harmonize the whole. He was already doing that with some of his earlier series paintings, but he was shifting from the 1890s in this new direction and actually probably even earlier than that.
- [20:16]
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- [20:48]
Melvin Bragg
Karen, can I turn to you again? He's about 60. He's established himself now in the sense of financially, because he was very, very poor, but now I can have a room at the Savoy and so on. Was his working method changing, or did he continue with the same working method and history caught up with him, or did he impose himself on history and they had to catch up with them?
- [21:08]
Karen Ser
He. His working method did evolve. And indeed, he does talk about that. He says that when he was young, he painted very fast, but now that he was getting older, he painted very slowly. But that said, as you say, he was 60 and yet he was just painting. Yeah, he eventually painted a hundred views of the. Of the Thames. And so we have to imagine him on his. On his balcony at the Savoy. At the time, the Savoy did have balconies. Those were removed later. Later on. So in a way, he's. He's still working out of doors, but in. Still in relative comfort, let's say. So he's on his balcony on the fifth floor, and one room is his bedroom, but then he had a second room completely cleared so that he could lay out all of these canvases that he was working on. And so we kind of imagine artists as doing preparatory drawings and planning everything out and then starting a painting and then finishing it, signing it. But that's not at all how he worked. He just wanted to capture the effects that Francis mentioned. But then they were so fleeting. He says, I can't work on a canvas more than five minutes. And so then he has to grab another canvas. And by the end of his stay, friends say that they were really alarmed. There was 80 canvases just all over the Savoy room. But that's how he worked. And he really didn't make it easy for himself. But he was so keen to capture these fleeting effects that that's the only way he found to be able to do that.
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Melvin Bragg
An effect that did was a tribute to the scene in front of him and also to the feelings inside him. This double effect, wasn't it?
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Karen Ser
Exactly. So he really loved. His letters are full of his admiration for nature. He tells Alice, you can't imagine what a fantastic day today was. There was fog, there was snow, there was light, there was wind. But. So he loved London for that, even though it was very challenging. But that's also part of the reason that he says he started all the canvases in London, but he did have to finish them in Giverny, a little back in his home, because he did need a little bit of distance from that motif. And that's where his impression, his memory of London, and also some of the imagination, you know, it was. For him, the color harmonies was very important. If he had to take a little bit of liberty with what he saw, or indeed enhance what he saw, that was absolutely fine for him.
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Melvin Bragg
Can we. Jackie, can we ask you to take just one of his work? Quite famous at the time still, as, I suppose, Waterloo Bridge, Misty Sunshine. Now, then, what was. What would you tell us about that?
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Jackie Wolschlager
It's interesting to compare that with the 1870 picture of the bridge, because here again we have this lovely Waterloo Bridge, early 19th century stone arch building. It's monumental, it's huge, and it becomes the anchoring diagonal of this picture. But then he just suffuses everything in this beautiful pink, purple mist. It's a really daring colour to put on a natural landscape of London. And he sort of dematerialises in. So the bridge becomes a phantom and the little boat in the foreground is like a ghost boat. And he dematerialises. And yet.
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Melvin Bragg
What do you mean by dematerializes?
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Jackie Wolschlager
I mean that it dissolves. All the forms, the outlines dissolve in this haze of light and color. And yet it moves all the time, it scintillates. So the bridge is reflected in the water and that seems to shimmer and move. And then going across the bridge, there are these little cabs with their flickering lights, so everything is moving. And then, nonetheless, he somehow harmonizes and unifies it. And it's as if he's painting what he sees and then imposing a sort of decorative synthesis on that as well. And it's very, very beautiful. And if you look closely at these paintings there, they're intricate, they're many, many layered. And I think one of the paradoxes is that he wants to catch that moment. And that particular painting is dated 1899 to 1903. And he's spending four years catching a moment, and it becomes something that the series together is something symphonic. It's not any longer a breezy, brilliant, impressionist rendering of one thing that takes his fancy. It's this motif at the same time every day.
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Melvin Bragg
What was the reaction when he came when it was shown?
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Jackie Wolschlager
The London paintings were very popular from the beginning, but the problem was to get Monet to part with them. He kept them there. And every time his dealer said, can I show one or two? He said, no, it's all of them or none of them. They. I have to harmonize them.
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Melvin Bragg
Let's. Let's go back. When he says all on all, he didn't mean all his paintings, he meant all in the series. We get back to this series idea, which was a radical view, radical move on his part. I'm not just painting one Waterloo Bridge, I'm going to paint nine at different times, because it's different for me at those different times. And I will sell them as a series.
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Jackie Wolschlager
Well, he didn't sell them as a series.
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Melvin Bragg
No, but they're There to be collectors as a series.
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Jackie Wolschlager
Yes. And they're there to be shown. And I think they're immersive. It's the beginning of the water lily idea that we're going to show these together in a room and you're going to be immersed in them. And that, I think, is how they're such transitional works. They're Monet Entering the 20th century, Monet becoming more abstract. And in the painting that I love so much, you sometimes think, well, you know, those paint marks, are they just doing what they like? They're not really referring anymore to. To the reflections on the water.
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Francis Fowle
Just to add to that, I mean, he was radical in the way you can compare him with someone like Pissarro. So Pissarro admired his paintings of Rouen Cathedral.
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Melvin Bragg
Pissarro was in London about the same.
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Francis Fowle
Time he was in London. Yes.
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Melvin Bragg
They were, in fact, friends, weren't they?
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Francis Fowle
They were very good friends. And Pissarro followed him very closely. His letters were always full of almost jealousy because Monet was commercially more successful than him, and he was always trying to work out ways in which he could emulate Monet. So in just before Monet embarked on this London series, Pissarro was in Rouen. And of course, Monet had painted the wrong cathedral, but Pissarro turned his back on the cathedral, and he paints the harbour and the bridges and the river, which is precisely what Monet will go on to do when he goes to London. But Pissarro, instead of doing what Monet did and kind of harmonizing the whole, he didn't exhibit them as a whole in the way that Monet does. He exhibits them individually and he doesn't think of them in this radical way. So that's the difference between the two.
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Melvin Bragg
Was there any sense in which he was an Anglophile Monet, I think.
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Francis Fowle
I mean, it's difficult this one, isn't it? I think that he was a confirmed Francophile, really, and that he saw London. There were two things really, about London. One was it was the biggest city in the world, and he saw it as a place to market his work and actually to market his work. Well, yes, or to sell his work, but. So if we go back to 1870, in fact, one of the most crucial things that happened during that stay was that he. He met Durand Ruel and was introduced the dealer, by the dealer, the art dealer, and it was Dur who would then support the Impressionist, go on to support the Impressionist. During that whole period, his work didn't sell very. Monet's work was not it didn't sell in Britain, but I think by the. By the end of the end of the 1890s, he was a much more successful and established artist. And so it was time to kind of start to penetrate the London market again, or to have a, you know, have a punt on the London market once again. So I think that he saw that opportunity. The other thing is he had close contacts in London. Whistler, for one. The other very close contact or friend was John Singer Sargent, also an American artist. And Sargent was actually in many ways Monet's disciple and had visited him at Giverny and invited him to stay, to come over to London and to stay at Corcolcook Mill, which is his country house near Reading. And there was, you know, they conducted correspondence with each other and Monet encouraged Sargent. But their relationship was kind of quite interesting because Monet definitely was the superior member of that friendship in that he becomes slightly irritated when, as he perceives it, Sargent starts to imitate his work. But Sargent also, at the same time, promoted his work through contemporaries who met at what was called the New English Art Club. So other British artists started to look at Monet's work and in particular Walter Sickert and people like Philip Wilson Steer. And they were keen to exhibit his work in London and to promote it. And then also Sargent introduced him to potential clients and particularly to Mary Hunter, who became his sort of. She was basically hosting dinner parties for him and introducing him to influential people.
- [30:17]
Melvin Bragg
We've mentioned Whistler, the American artist who was in London and painting nocturnes, not in the same way, but still a very big force line. And Monyon went back to Wister's studio. They talked and they were friends and so on. The great elephant in the room, really, for other people listening. Say, what about Turner? He was working there. Why isn't he popping up?
- [30:39]
Francis Fowle
So I think Turner is also important and. But yes, so the thing is that the English critic, English critics, always cited Turner when it came to Impressionism. And Turner as being a very important precursor of Impressionism. He certainly, you know, was also interested in these kind of atmospheric effects, the similar kind of effects that Monet.
- [31:02]
Melvin Bragg
Rail, Steam and Speed is one of the key paintings that inspired that movement forward of industrial Impressionism.
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Francis Fowle
Yes.
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Melvin Bragg
Karen, can I turn to you again? What effect did Turner have on Monet.
- [31:17]
Karen Ser
By taking on the Thames as a subject matter? Monet absolutely knew that he was also taking on Turner because his paintings of fog and steam and smoke above water were really crucial by then. And indeed, Monet knew Turner's work very well, ever since his first visits to the National Gallery in 1870. And he obviously saw Rain, Steam and Speed, as well as other works that Turner had given to the nation. So there's no question that Turner was an important influence. And indeed, when the Thames series by Monet was unveiled in 1904, one of the critics praised Monet as our French Turner. I'm not sure that's actually something that he would have welcomed, because his relationship with Turner was complicated, because he obviously admired him, but at the same time, he didn't want to appear too slavish to him and he wanted to emphasize the novelty of his own artistic project. And same thing for Whistler. Those two artists, Turner and Whistler, were so linked to the Thames. But Monet in many ways is doing something very different in representing really the heart of the city and also its industrial hub in the south bank and all the factories, but also, as Francis said, the working river. So I think, even though those artists were absolutely crucial, and indeed it was quite bold for Monet to come to England and take on the ultimate British artist in Turner, I think he would say that he had his own project.
- [33:07]
Jackie Wolschlager
Monet didn't like the Turner comparison at all. And he played it down.
- [33:12]
Melvin Bragg
Why not?
- [33:12]
Jackie Wolschlager
And he said, turner is a romantic, he paints fancies, but I paint actually what I see in front of me. And he always drew that comparison.
- [33:20]
Melvin Bragg
Spidey, Tamara Gosh's Last Birth. I mean, is that entirely romantic? Anyway, never mind. Did he not challenge his own view?
- [33:27]
Jackie Wolschlager
I think there was a similarity in the end, because both of them were pushing towards an abstraction.
- [33:33]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah.
- [33:33]
Jackie Wolschlager
And I think that was similar.
- [33:35]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. Can we come back, Francis, to his Monet's bridge painting, Charing Cross and Waterloo and the whole stretch there up to the House of Parliament? Can you talk a bit more about that?
- [33:47]
Francis Fowle
Yes. In some ways, it's quite an unusual subject to choose, I think. I mean, it's quite challenging and. I mean, I think even today people find those paintings quite challenging because you're looking down on this horizontal stretch across a kind of misty river and it is entering the realms of abstraction. And what's interesting is that when it comes to the House of Parliament paintings, they're almost. Although they're incredibly sort of innovative in the use of colour and the way that the background is completely suppressed. I mean, the bridge paintings are much more realistic initially. And, for example, you can see the direction of the wind, the smoke coming out of the chimneys. You can actually identify individual factories in some of the paintings. And With Hazards of Parliament pictures, they're much more abstract. I think that in some ways they're actually easier to read. And certainly when Durandal came to sell them, he priced them slightly more. They were slightly more expensive to buy than the bridge paintings, probably because it was an iconic building. And he felt that maybe people wouldn't be able to kind of. I mean, you know, anyone outside London wouldn't necessarily know what these bridges were at all. I think if you live in London, you do recognize them as, you know, part of that kind of central Thames. And these are very key architectural elements. But, you know, I live in Scotland and they mean less to me, maybe.
- [35:15]
Melvin Bragg
Karen, about this time, he. When he went back to France, Monet was beginning his Water Lily series in his garden in Germany. Can you tell us why he made that switch or what it meant to him to make that switch?
- [35:31]
Karen Ser
It's very interesting that he was painting these two series, so the Thames series and the Water Lily series almost simultaneously. He had started before he went to London, very shortly before to paint his garden, especially the Japanese bridge and the water lilies. But he started more in earnest after his return. And those two series are by far the most ambitious of his career. And again, the other series, like Rouen Cathedral, they only had maybe 20, 30 paintings. For those two series, we're talking a hundred and plus.
- [36:09]
Melvin Bragg
You mean the water lily's in London?
- [36:11]
Karen Ser
Yes, exactly. So it's a hundred paintings of these motifs. And it can seem a bit contradictory because one of them depicts the most, the busiest, the most populous city in the world at that time, at really the heart of industrialization. And the other is Monet's own very peaceful, wonderful backyard with the water lilies. But actually they are incredibly similar because they reflect his interest in the rendering of light in the sky and especially on water, as Jackie mentioned, and crucially, the blurring of the horizon. And if you look at the Thames pictures, thank God the bridges are there because they're the line. But otherwise the sky and the Thames completely meld into each other. And so in that way, they're very, very similar. And Monet's fascination with the power of nature is really interesting in terms of, on the one hand, in London, with the fog just dissolving these very solid structures and architecture, and then in Giverny in his garden, how the very humble water lily can, when magnified on a large scale, can just become this incredible, impressive work. So I think in his mind they were very similar in that they were bore out of the same project.
- [37:37]
Melvin Bragg
Jackie, in what way? Was he. Was he still innovating at this late stage in his career?
- [37:44]
Jackie Wolschlager
I see the London paintings really as a landmark, and they sort of usher in a late Monet, the way that very great elderly artists become fascinated with the abstract character of reality. You see it in Rembrandt, you see it in Titian, and I think London allowed Monet to set himself free to do that. And one of the things that's so fascinating about the water lilies, as Karen said, it's this tiny pond, but London has allowed him to really have an expansive vision, and he takes that expanse back to Giverny and makes these enormous paintings on a. On a London scale.
- [38:20]
Melvin Bragg
Plus plus so you would say that the innovation was the enlargement.
- [38:24]
Jackie Wolschlager
The innovation was also becoming progressively more abstract. With the water lilies, he really is leaving representational painting behind. And in London, you see that on its way, but it hasn't quite come. I think that's the major thing. And the other innovation is that the water lilies were considered conceived to be immersive. He wanted them shown like that. He wanted us to feel that we were surrounded by his pond. And I think, London, we're getting there, but it's not quite that.
- [38:53]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. Francis, how do these Thames paintings, the London Thames painting, relate to the rest of his work?
- [39:00]
Francis Fowle
It's a tricky one because I think they're probably less well known than many of his other works, especially the series paintings. Well, Jackie mentioned at the beginning that most of the series that he did up to the point when he went to London were these iconic French elements in the landscape, like haystacks or grain stacks or the poplars or Rouen Cathedral, and then suddenly changing to the city of London was quite a sort of innovative move for him. I think one of the problems with this series is that it's. And maybe it's one of the problems with the water lilies, too. People have this kind of conception of what they think the water lily paintings represent that actually, you know, there are so many and they're so diverse. And he was always dissatisfied. You know, this whole thing of not being able to give up the paintings. Some of them are really quite unfinished. I mean, in the real sense of the word, and unresolved. And so they've been sort of rather largely dispersed throughout the world as well. So, you know, there's no one place you can go to see a group of these London bridges together. We really don't. I don't think we know them as well as we should.
- [40:11]
Melvin Bragg
Karen, how did these London paintings go down with the paying public or the buying public.
- [40:17]
Karen Ser
His 10 series was so just a selection of 37 works out of the hundred or more that he started in London were shown in Paris in 1904, so three years after his last trip to London. And so all that time he was working on them in Giverny. And this exhibition was by far his most critically successful and commercially successful. He sold, or indeed his dealer, Durand Ruel, sold two thirds of the show. And indeed, critics hailed, finally, the, you know, the last Impressionists and the recognition of impressionism, you know, 40 years or 50 years after the fact. But they were absolutely crucial for. And they really cemented his reputation as France's leading painter. And they were sold, interestingly, to collectors all over the world, to Russia and America and Germany. The one category of collectors who did not buy them and to Monet's great chagrin, were British collectors. And so I don't. I think, yeah, it's unclear if it was because the subjects were a little bit too prosaic. It didn't feel like, you know, like, exotic enough to have to have a Charing Cross Bridge. Or indeed, because Impressionism at the time hadn't quite arrived in Britain and it would take another couple of decades.
- [41:49]
Melvin Bragg
Francis.
- [41:50]
Francis Fowle
Well, I was interested actually in the critical reception from one critic anyway, Winfrey Dewhurst, because he, generally speaking, the French critics were quite receptive. And he writes, is rather a wonderful quota. He writes the autumnal fogs, which harmonize discordant tones, round off harsh outlines, cloak the ugly and create the beautiful, are to the foreigner, London's greatest charm, although to the inhabitants, they are a deadly affliction. So he was seeing this fog as being, you know, what it was? It was actually a polluting and dangerous aspect of the London weather.
- [42:25]
Karen Ser
And indeed, for the French, the fog was so associated with London that they found it charming and beautiful and characteristic, and indeed as characteristic a feature as the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben or anything else. And so they were absolutely entranced by it. Of course, looking at them today, we know all the pollution and all the harm it caused, but at the time, it was considered a fundamentally British thing.
- [42:58]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you. Thanks to Karen, Sir Francis Powell and Jackie walshlager. Next week, bacteriophages, viruses that kill bacteria, but not us and how they could help us fight infection. Thanks for listening.
- [43:11]
Francis Fowle
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:19]
Melvin Bragg
What would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say.
- [43:21]
Francis Fowle
I wanted to mention the Venice series because. Because that comes between the London series and the water lilies. And actually, I wonder whether he learned some lessons in. In the interview, he became less. You know, you're talking about him developing towards abstraction. But in the Venice series, he first of all limits the number he produces, but that's because it was only one visit. He also paints more recognizable motifs. So, you know, for example, the Dogey's palace, you know, the Grand Canal. And it's almost like he's kind of painting more with a commercial eye again. Whereas in the London series he feels quite liberated. And the color. The kind of color range in the Victor in the Venice pictures is very much kind of on the brighter side. They're not as basically dull and gloomy as some of the London paintings. So. Yes, I just wonder what was going on at that time, Jackie.
- [44:15]
Jackie Wolschlager
I think he didn't see the Venice paintings as a series. And in London he came and went and he got to know it. And I think he turned up in Venice, he was swearing that he just finished some water lilies and he was swearing he wasn't going to paint at all. And he had to have his canvases sent from Paris so that he could paint. And I think it was new. And he quite deprecated the Venice series. I love them. I love what you say about the difference with London and Venice, but they weren't intended as a series. And there was just one thing that I wanted to say about the London ones. With the series painting as a whole, Monet starts to paint time as well as place, and I think that's quite an important thing. The series painting started when he was 50 and he was beginning to step back, look back, and he's painting memory and things coming and going in the mind. And I think the series paintings do that. And I think the Venice ones, they actually do something else. And it's interesting why, whether it's a shorter visit, whether it's because he finished them in a state of absolute bereavement when Alice had died and he couldn't really paint. I don't know why it is, but they are different. And they're not so much about time, whereas the. Or they're about monuments. The way everything is disappearing in those reflections and those Venice houses with the windows like tombstones, all black. But they're not about time passing in the way that you can look at the different London bridges or the water lilies and think, this is one moment and here's the next moment, and it's about one man's feeling about his memories as well as being there.
- [45:48]
Karen Ser
Karen the one thing I did want to say is, is how important exhibitions were for Monet. I think we kind of. Maybe we forget. We just think of him, you know, just painting away, solid in solitude, but actually from a very early stage. And certainly for the. For the series paintings, he had very much their display at the back of his. Of his mind. And so how they were going to be seen was actually an important factor in how he finished them. So, for example, for the Thames series, even though he started 100 plus, as we said, he then selected this smaller group of 37, and he finished them specifically for this unveiling in 1904 that was so important. He even provided the frames so that they would all be framed the same height, thought about how they would hang. And for him, that was the moment, the unveiling and the experience of seeing them all together. And that's that experience that he wanted the audience to have and the same experience that he. That he had in his studio. But he wanted to shape that experience. And what's so kind of tragic, in many ways, is that because the Temp series was so popular then, all of these works were sold one by one, and so they were dispersed all over the world. And indeed, when he showed the series of the Rouen Cathedral, his great friend Clemenceau said, the French state should buy the whole lot because it's together that they need to be. To be seen. And so I think that's maybe this idea. Today in contemporary art, we think of installations, and in many ways, Monet was, you know, ahead of his time. For him, all the paintings together were an installation rather than seeing them one by one. So I think that's quite an important way to think of Monet's work, because that's very much the way he thought about it.
- [47:57]
Francis Fowle
Kind of takes us back to Whistler, though, doesn't it? Because Whistler himself also was very interested in the way that a painting harmonized with its surroundings. And he was very prescriptive about the way that. That his art should be displayed. And so I still see Monet as. Even though we talk about him moving into abstraction, I do think that he goes through this, and he denied this. He denied he was ever influenced by the Symbolist movement. But I do feel that he definitely absorbed those ideas and Mallarme's ideas of suggesting rather than describing reality. And I do think some of Whistler's aesthetic rubbed off on him. You can certainly see that. You can see Whistler through the Thames series. And you talk about the ghostly boatman. You know, there are so many parallels with Whistler's work. And I think he's. I always feel that Whistler is the unsung hero almost that is overlooked when it comes to Monet because Monet's such a big character. But I think he did owe something to him.
- [48:55]
Jackie Wolschlager
But Monet did also change something because after his London series, then everybody wanted to do these series. And Whistler I think we still think of as sort of as a 19th century symbolist. But after Monet's London, the dealer Vollar sent the Fauve painter Derain straight across to London to do exactly the same thing. And he did. His colors were yet more non representational and sensational than Monet. So I do think of Monet as starting something thing as well.
- [49:27]
Karen Ser
I think Monet has also suffered from the fact that the dealers and critics really upheld this notion of him painting outdoors in all weathers. And that was a huge selling point for many, many years after he had completely abandoned the practice and was working in his studio and was very open about it. But it was just too good a story for dealers and critics and collectors loved that. And so I think he's. He suffered from that, from that idea. And a little bit what you were saying, Francis, about how the, you know, he did become symbolist in that he does take a distance from the motif. He does heighten the colors. He, you know, he's not exact and accurate in a way that he was at the beginning of his. More at the beginning of his career. But I think that's actually the fault of the way he was talked about rather than him.
- [50:22]
Melvin Bragg
Did he still think of himself as an Impressionist as time went by?
- [50:27]
Jackie Wolschlager
I think he insisted that he was. He couldn't let go of that. He wanted to keep always the motif in mind. He just in a sense magnified it in his mind to something bigger and more imaginative.
- [50:40]
Karen Ser
And Indeed, critics in 1904 said he is Impressionism all by himself. And in a way, Impressionism just became whatever Monet decided to paint. He was the last one standing. But again, I think that's obscured how radical and avant garde and forward thinking he was by maybe tying him to this older label.
- [51:03]
Melvin Bragg
I think we're about to be invaded by the producer John Gowdy. Yes, here he comes. Anybody likes tea or coffee?
- [51:11]
Jackie Wolschlager
Fine, thank you.
- [51:11]
Karen Ser
I'm good, thank you.
- [51:13]
Melvin Bragg
I love cup of tea, please.
- [51:15]
Jackie Wolschlager
Thank you all very much. Thank you very, very much.
- [51:18]
Francis Fowle
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [51:25]
F
Hello, I'm Adam Fleming. This is going to be my sixth general election as a journalist for the BBC. Political people and campaigners love using their own language, so we thought we'd make a series for BBC Radio 4, unpicking it all. What is a manifesto? What's swing? How do opinion polls work? Who picks the candidates? That is the subject of my podcast series, Understand the UK Election, available on BBC Sounds.