Fog, tea and full English breakfasts: Monet and London, at the Courtauld, reviewed

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough, but the Frenchman spoke almost no English and you could smell the turps down the corridor. Whatever was the management thinking?

What the management was thinking was that the Frenchman was an internationally famous artist and the Thames views that he was painting from his window would serve as great publicity for the capital’s most expensive hotel, which in 1900 advertised ‘a panorama from Battersea to the Tower Bridge… in all weathers, in sunshine or in rain or in the fog loved by Mr Whistler, a thing of beauty’.

It was Monet’s second stay at the Savoy – the previous autumn of 1899 he had shared a 6th floor suite with his wife Alice and stepdaughter Germaine – and his fourth in London. During the Franco-Prussian war 30 years earlier he had spent ‘a miserable time’ cooped up in a poky flat off Piccadilly Circus with first wife Camille and their young son Jean, dodging the draft. Now he was back, a wealthy artist about to turn 60, embarking on his most ambitious painting project. If Monet hadn’t already started working in series, the vagaries of the British climate would have forced him to. When the weather wouldn’t co-operate at his home in Giverny he would go back to bed and sulk, but that was not an option at the Savoy. So he developed a system of shifting between canvases, starting a new one to capture a new effect, then picking up an old when an effect was repeated.