Dali House

I think the news media may have got a little carried away with a scientific study of Claude Monet’s paintings of the British Houses of Parliament, the the preliminary results of which were published last month.

So far, environmental scientists are merely hoping that the pictures might be read as a pollution chart. I’m not really sure why they want to do this, but I suppose having a big name like Monet at the top of your research proposal makes it a hell of a lot easier to get funding.

His series of depictions of the scene on the Thames between 1899 and 1901 have always enthralled because of the scintillating impressionistic style, which helped open the door to the relative fireworks of pointillism.

But now researchers Jacob Baker and John Thornes at the University of Birmingham are wondering if the paintings were in fact faithful depictions of the Victorian weather.

They analysed the position of the sun in nine works and compared their findings with data from the US Naval Observatory to determine when exactly the paintings were made, arriving at dates that matched Monet’s accounts in letters to his wife.

There was no modification afterward at his studio in Giverny, they decided in a report to the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Monet (1840-1926) made three trips to the English capital between 1899 and 1901, producing hundreds of paintings, including no fewer than 95 along this part of the Thames, though only 12 are dated to those three years. Another 61 date from 1902 to 1905; 22 have no dates, all of which suggest he was churning them out in Normandy long after he’d been at the locales.

“Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Breaking Through the Fog”, 1904

The common wisdom is that he woke early each day to capture the dawn from his hotel window, then in the evening painted the sunset through the fog. In fact, if I’m reading the news reports correctly, Baker and Thornes reckon Monet must have painted all of his Parliament pictures in the afternoons, between February 14 and March 24, 1900! As the days passed, the sun set further to the right, until eventually it was to the right of Big Ben.

The study also turned up a something that will interest art historians and Google Earth nuts alike: Monet had two specific locations from which he painted.

There are two southward views from the Savoy Hotel on the Strand, where he was staying, and one westward view from St Thomas’ Hospital, in the administration block on the second floor. There was a covered terrace attached to the former Governor’s Hall. This block, the one nearest Westminster Bridge, was heavily damaged in the blitz but stayed in use, finally being rebuilt in 1976.

The thickness of London’s “great fogs” peaked in the late 1880s, then gradually declined, leaving wonderful memories of vistas through which Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes poked and probed. But no one really knows what caused them — there’s just a general pointing of fingers at industry.

“Air quality and health-related issues tended to be neglected,” Baker says (inviting another round of “so what?”).

His next step is to analyse the colours in the paintings to try and work out what particles made up the old pea soup. He wants the colour of the sunset to tell him the size, density and composition of the fog particles, noting that oily specks produce a yellowish-green haze and soot particles a bluish hue.

The Guardian, as usual, takes these proceedings a sensitive step further than other media outlets, noting that Monet was pretty miserable in London all this time because of (what else?) the weather. Getting that mess on canvas was “diabolically difficult”, he wrote his wife over in sun-kissed Normandy.

“Still no sign of the sun, nor a break in the clouds,” he grumbled on March 7, 1900. “Time goes by and the sun also, so that on the day when it will decide to appear, it will no longer be in the same place.”

A year later things were even worse, and pleurisy ultimately forced him home. “Three weeks in this hotel room without being able to work,” he wrote, “not having any more the heart to look at this beautiful Thames, seeing so many lost efforts.”

Over at WebMuseum, trusty source Nicolas Pioch shows off “The Thames at Westminster (Westminster Bridge)” from 1871 alongside three of the later views.

He says Camille Pissarro once wrote about those great times when the two Frenchmen were taking cover in London during the Franco-German war. “Monet and I were very enthusiastic over the London landscapes.” Pissarro preferred painting the “charming suburb” of Lower Norwood while Monet was already doing Westminster (and Hyde Park).

Back then, in 1871, Pioch notes, Monet’s “fog-laden sky is certainly impressionist but the silhouette of the parliament buildings does not suggest any debt to Turner, whose works the two French artists now saw”. He was at that point closer to Whistler, who had just completed his “Nocturnes”, and both showed their debt to Japanese prints.

“Le Parlement, Effet de Brouillard”, 1904

Turner’s influence kicked in for the Monet Thames paintings that Baker and Thornes are studying, the free use of colour and “chromatic richnesses”, the silhouette now “densities of purple and blue with a contrast of gold”.

“This series,” writes Pioch, “is the supreme expression of his conception of an ‘envelope’ of interactive coloured light … [illustrating] how the changing ‘envelope’ transforms what we perceive.

Finally, in the last painting of the series, the buildings and river are no longer inert but vie for the attention “with fantastically dynamic form”.

“The spiraling brushstrokes of the tower sweep it upward majestically, seeming to draw contrails of the envelope into its vortex. The river, too, takes on a more aggressive aspect, the highlighted wave crests creating a groundswell at the base of the tower that contributes to the rising effect. As the tower stretches toward the bright sky at the very pinnacle of the canvas, Monet succeeds masterfully in expressing a dazzling sense of supreme aspiration.”

Alrighty, then!

That’s a lot more than smog and weather, isn’t it? Christopher Riopelle of the National Gallery in London advised The Guardian not to get too hung up on the new research.

Monet, he said, “is not taking a photograph – he is creating a surface with paint that is interesting in and of itself. Scientific people, to my mind, often overestimate the specificity of painted images. The pictures in London one would assume would have been very accurate, but he is an artist who, in addition to observing nature, is making all kinds of aesthetic decisions.”

“Houses of Parliament, London”, 1905