Claude Monet
1902
Oil on canvas
Claude Monet had first painted London in 1870, when, as a penniless artist, he had sought refuge here from the Franco- Prussian war with his wife and son. Thirty years later, he was a wealthy man able to afford London’s most expensive hotel, the Savoy, which offered an unparalleled panorama of the Thames. The view up the river was dominated by the iron railway bridge leading into the recently opened Charing Cross Station. Monet’s representation of trains trailing steam as they pass over the river presents London as a quintessentially modern landscape.