Claude Monet
1903
Oil on canvas
73.4 x 100.3 cm
A year after purchasing this painting at the 1904 exhibition, its new owner wrote to Claude Monet, ‘It is the first time that I am back in London since seeing your Thameses, and I must tell you all the joy I had to see once again this wonderful landscape, which you have enabled us to understand better. There was today one of those luminous half-fogs: I stopped ten times on the bridges and the banks thinking of you’. Monet’s Views of the Thames influenced the way some people perceived the smog, which became, in their eyes, a source of poetic revelry rather than a health hazard.