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In 1899 in London, Claude Monet looked out on the Thames from his hotel balcony and the Savoy Hotel and began in 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 two kinder words.
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 than of his water lilies or haystacks or ruin cathedral.
And they gave him the confidence to explore an art that was more abstract than impressionist.
We need to discuss Lord Monet in England.
Our current sir, 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 the Restless Vision.
Jackie, he was born in 1840.
Can you take us through the first two or three decades of his life?
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.