How London's smog inspired the French impressionists

So it feels a surprise to recall that there were significant periods during which key impressionists were living in Britain, and producing work there that would turn out to be crucial to the development of art on both sides of the Channel: Pissarro’s marvellously matter-of-fact depictions of suburban avenues and railway stations, for example, or Alfred Sisley’s sparkling views of the Thames at Molesey, or Monet’s magnificent series on the fogbound Houses of Parliament. These works can all be seen in a new exhibition at Tate Britain, The Impressionists in London.

“The French artists found the atmosphere of the Thames very challenging,” says Tate curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons. “Most of them complained about the London fog.” Apart from Monet, she adds, who was fascinated by the toxic haze of water vapour, industrial pollution and soot from domestic fires that hung over the city, “the way the fog shrouded the whole capital in a kind of unifying veil; what he called ‘the envelope’. He noted that British artists didn’t paint these things – as though they didn’t see them.”

Looking at Monet’s Impression, Sunrise – the 1872 painting that goaded an unsympathetic critic to coin the term “impressionism” as an insult – you see layers of opaque paint in the rendering of the sky, quite different from the typical bright, transparent impressionist tones. Painted shortly after Monet’s return to France from London, its treatment corresponds directly to The Thames Below Westminster (1871), his first painting of London.

The latter, with its hazy outlines of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, might appear a timeless London scene, but everything in it was fresh: the Palace of Westminster had only been completed in 1859, while the painting shows the embankment still being built, right in front of us.

“The Victoria Tower, the central part of the Houses of Parliament, was the tallest building in Europe,” says Corbeau-Parsons. “For French artists in London it was a monstrous, challenging structure like, say, the Shard today, a symbol of the power and wealth of the British Empire at a time when Paris was still in ruins. And they all painted it, not least because it was considered a saleable subject.”

Pissarro, who was 10 years older than Monet and – crucially – fluent in English, found it easier to adapt to British life. He was fascinated by the liminal space between the city and the countryside. “We think of the impressionists in terms of fields and clouds,” says art historian Kathleen Adler, an expert on Pissarro’s work in London, “but they were fascinated by the modern, by the way cities change and develop.”

Looking at Pissarro’s painting Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, with its snowbound rural lane (used on one of the National Gallery’s most popular Christmas card), you assume you’re in the countryside. But put it beside his Crystal Palace, Upper Norwood, painted practically from the same spot but facing in the other direction, you see the massed roofs of suburbia crowding the middle distance, with Crystal Palace looming above.

“Pissarro liked the look of the rows of houses built in London stock-bricks which were then bright yellow,” says Adler. “He liked the idea that the life of a family was contained in each house – so different from the French apartment block – with people going to work on these little trains. Pissarro loved trains – all the impressionists did.”

Indeed, as a socialist, Pissarro may have seen in south London suburbia elements of an egalitarian utopia. Generally, however, the impressionists had little good to say about British life and culture. Although London had a thriving art market, Pissarro complained it had no art, only commerce. Eventually brought together by the influential art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who had moved his business from Paris for the duration of the war, Monet and Pissarro would meet in the National Gallery to grumble about their lack of money and plot how they would introduce the world to impressionism while marvelling at the old master paintings.

Although they had little interest in British art, they made an exception for two painters: Constable and Turner – particularly the late paintings of the latter, with their expressive, near-abstract immersion in light and atmosphere, not least on the Thames, close to where they themselves had painted. This enthusiasm has led to an assumption, heard from British commentators to this day, that Turner provided the essential starting point for impressionism: a view Pissarro brusquely rebuffed in 1903. Turner, he claimed, had fundamentally misunderstood the representation of light by including black in his palette; rather, the antecedents of impressionism lay in the French tradition, from the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain to Monet’s mentor, Charles Francois Daubigny.

Monet and Pissarro returned to France in 1871, the former having failed to sell a single painting, the latter only four, and those went to a French, rather than a British buyer. Both felt they had unfinished business in Britain. Pissarro was the first to return in 1890, creating Charing Cross Bridge, London, in which the Houses of Parliament rise amid exquisite, pearly light. But for the opposition of his wife, Pissarro might have been tempted to settle permanently in London; his son Lucien, also a painter, had already moved there, establishing himself in Hammersmith and creating a dynasty of painting Pissarros in London that continues to this day.

It was Monet, however, who grappled more decisively with the chimera of the Thames. Having expressed interest in returning to confront this elusive phenomenon from as early as 1880, it wasn’t until 1899, when he was nearly 60 and one of Europe’s most famous artists, that he finally made the journey, prompted by an urge to revisit themes from earlier in his career, “to create a kind of synthesis where I would sum up… my impressions and sensations of the past,” he said.

Taking a suite in London’s most luxurious hotel, the Savoy, he set about painting 90 views of the river, including the great commuter arteries of Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. Running through this was a desire to make good on his earlier “miserable time” in London, in a spirit, as Corbeau-Parsons puts it, of “I’ll show you.”

If Monet painted London entirely en plein air on his earlier visit, now he was synthesising his impressions of a subject, in situ and in the studio, creating a kind of symphonic view of the imposing buildings in varying lights and atmospheres: the incandescent sun seems to explode out of the fog in one painting, the whole scene is submerged in a violet haze in another.

His friend John Singer Sargent recalled that Monet would have as many as 80 paintings on the go at once in his Savoy suite. “Sargent thought Monet was a bit of a maniac,” says Corbeau-Parsons. “And Monet thought he was driving himself mad, adding to a painting to try to capture the exact light and mood of a particular time of day, then feeling half an hour later that he’d ruined it.”

While all the paintings were started in London, Monet completed the series at his studio at Giverny, in 1904. They were exhibited very successfully at Durand-Ruel’s Paris gallery the same year, selling to buyers from all over Europe and the United States. Monet was dismayed to discover, however, that none of these buyers were British. Moreover, the dealer, who did not want to blunt the impact of a much larger impressionist exhibition he had planned for the following year, ignored Monet’s imploring to have the exhibition transferred to London.

Yet even though Monet’s great appeal to British taste had failed – for the time being, at least – it’s hard to overstate the importance of the impressionists’ time in London. There they produced paintings that altered the course of art. Indeed, some proof of their ultimate success is that we now regard Monet and Pissarro’s paintings not only as some of the defining images of London, but as far “truer” in their evocation of the capital than anything produced by their British contemporaries.

Impressionists in London is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (tate.org.uk) from November 2. Telegraph subscribers can claim 20 per cent off entry. See: telegraph.co.uk/rewards