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’.