Impressonist show paints capital in a ravishing light
Impressionists in London Tate Britain
★★★★★
First things first: we need to talk about the title of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition. Impressionists in London must be the most misleading name for a show in living memory.
The germ of the exhibition is a historical fact: during the Francoprussian War, a handful of painters later associated with Impressionism fled Paris and found refuge in London. Chief among them were Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. The trouble is, in 1870-71, Impressionism still had not fully bloomed. Moreover, for the painters themselves, their interlude in the British capital had little impact. Pissarro painted unexceptional landscapes of the suburbs to the south of London where he was staying. Has anyone ever looked at one of them and found it thrilling? Monet, who arrived in autumn 1870, produced only six paintings during his eight months in London – hardly a rush of inspiration.
Indeed, the melancholy he felt in exile is expressed in a painting of his wife, Camille, whom he married during the summer of 1870. In it, she sits glumly on a chaise longue, probably in their sparse lodgings in Kensington, with a closed book upon her lap, staring at a strip of radiant voile rippling in front of the window, as though wishing she could escape.
This is no glorious vision of a fashionista enjoying herself in a sun-drenched garden, as we find in Monet’s great Impressionist pictures of the 1870s. Indeed, the only flowers here are artificial, in the chintzy pattern of the upholstery.
Admittedly, Monet and Pissarro returned to London later in their careers. A sensational room containing six of Monet’s views of the Houses of Parliament, appearing like vaporous fairy-palaces seemingly materialising (or should that be evaporating?) amid swathes of pink and lavender mist, is the most compelling reason to visit this exhibition.
Without wishing to sound pedantic, though, by the time Monet summoned his gorgeous visions of the Palace of Westminster’s cloud-capped towers – he began the series in February 1900, working on a covered terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital – Impressionism was already a thing of the past.
Calling this exhibition Impressionists in London, then, is something of a cheat, a marketing ploy to pull in paying punters. The subtitle of the show, “French Artists in Exile 1870-1904”, offers a more accurate, albeit prosaic, description of the ground that is covered.
Even here, though, it is possible to quibble: when the young André Derain, following in Monet’s footsteps, arrived in London in 1906 to paint the Thames (three of his superbly vigorous cityscapes provide a coda to the exhibition), he did so at the instigation of his dealer. Derain was neither an Impressionist, nor “in exile”.
So, given the paucity of Impressionism in this “Impressionist” exhibition of more than 100 artworks, what, in fact, is on the walls? The answer is, a lot of work by French artists who were anathema to the Impressionists. Aside from Monet, one of the exhibition’s “heroes” is James Tissot, who crossed the Channel in 1871, and ended up buying a house in fashionable St John’s Wood.
An entire gallery presents his polished pictures of high society. Reminded that Tissot worked as a caricaturist for Vanity Fair, we are invited to consider him as an Austenlike figure, casting a sardonic outsider’s eye upon the curious behaviour of British toffs. Really, though, Tissot was a manicured and superficial fawner.
His irredeemably insincere work provides an accidental masterclass in why Impressionism was so exciting: contrast Monet’s déshabillé rendering of chintz, in his painting of Camille, with Tissot’s finicky version of the same, in a portrait of a captain of the Royal Horse Guards. Tissot describes, spelling out every detail; Monet paints.
Perhaps, like me, you will be more taken with the canvases of Alphonse Legros, a central figure in the network of émigré French artists in London. Legros has none of Tissot’s meretricious flash and sparkle. But he, too, could blunder: witness the off-putting, reptilian skin of the old woman in his large canvas Ex-voto (1860), with which he made his name at the Royal Academy in 1864.
Elsewhere, there are more miniature solo shows for the sculptors Jules Dalou, best known for his sweet terracotta of a peasant woman nursing a baby in the V&A, and Jean-baptiste Carpeaux, a courtier of Napoleon III.
Carpeaux’s marble portrait busts seduce. But the centrepiece of his gallery, a sculpture of Flora, the ancient goddess of flowers, inspired by the Hellenistic Crouching Aphrodite, is kittenish to the point of kitsch.
In short, this is a curious, splitpersonality exhibition, padded out instead of being tailored to its subject. Since the whole amounts to considerably less than the parts, go to savour individual moments such as Monet’s Leicester Square at Night (c1901), from the Musée Granet in Aix-en-provence. This bravura display of energetic brushwork anticipates abstraction in the manner of his paintings of his water lily pond at Giverny. At the same time, its streaks of red, orange and yellow brilliantly evoke glinting gas-lit illuminations and London’s rain-slick streets.
And, of course, there is the beautiful gallery of Monet’s views of Westminster. Here, too, Monet foreshadows abstraction: half-close your eyes, and you could be contemplating a row of Rothkos.
The gallery is hung and lit immaculately, so that we consider subtle differences between ostensibly similar pictures. In one, opalescent sunlight irradiates the fog. In another, the glowing orb of the sun is seen to set. Although grounded in direct observation, Monet’s effects of light always suggest something ineffable and other-worldly. His paintings are candyfloss for the soul.
Looking at them, I was reminded of Cézanne’s description of Monet as “only an eye – but what an eye!” London has never looked so ravishing.
From Nov 2 until May 7; information: 020 7887 8888