Monet's Colors Show Polluted London

Aug. 9, 2006 — Claude Monet's renditions of foggy London could be the earliest colored record of the notorious "peasouper" smog that wrapped the British capital at the turn of the 20th century, according to a scientific analysis of the artist's "London series."

The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, showed that Monet's paintings of the House of Parliament were not created from his imagination — on the contrary, they were firmly based on actual observations made during the artist's visits to London.

A founder of impressionism, Monet (1840-1926) made three trips to the city between 1899 and 1901, producing hundreds of paintings.

Showing the sun struggling to filter through the mist and smoke of Victorian London, the paintings depict the most famous global meteorological phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The paintings show three views of central London engulfed by fog. Two southward views are from the Savoy Hotel, where the French artist had a room, and one westward view is of the House of Parliament taken from St. Thomas' Hospital.

Among the 95 paintings of the series still existing, only 12 are dated between 1899 and 1901. Sixty-one are dated between 1902 and 1905, and 22 are undated.

This has suggested that Monet dated his works to the time they were completed or sold, when he had already returned from London to his home at Giverny in Normandy, northern France.

"There is some uncertainty as to whether the paintings are reasonably accurate depictions of observations — one of the tenets of impressionism — or whether the final paintings were rather creations of Monet's imagination in his studio in Giverny," Jacob Baker, of the University of Birmingham, told Discovery News.

To establish whether Monet's paintings are a fair rendering of what he observed, Baker and his colleague John Thornes from the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences analyzed the position of the sun in nine of Monet's paintings showing the Houses of Parliament.

The researchers turned to astronomical data from the U.S. Naval Observatory to trace the sun's position over Parliament during the artist's stay in London. They compared this data to the position of the sun in the paintings.

Along with information in Monet's letters to his wife, the results revealed that Monet painted his Parliament pictures all in the afternoon, between Feb. 14 and March 24, 1900.

Further calculations made it possible to discover the exact spot from which the French artist painted the pictures: a second-floor covered terrace of the former Governor's Hall at St. Thomas' Hospital.

"We are confident that these paintings show an accurate visual record of the urban atmosphere of Victorian London," Thornes said in a statement.

London's "great fogs" reached a peak in the late 1880s, then gradually declined. However, little is known about the nature and causes of the phenomenon, due to the absence of air quality monitoring at the time.

"The Victorian fogs tended to be associated with industry, employment and wealth to the minds of Londoners at that time. Air quality and health-related issues tended to be neglected," Baker told Discovery News.

Baker and Thornes are now planning further detective work on Monet's colors to determine the size, density and composition of Victorian fog particles.