How Monet's paintings are used to explore London smog today

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Impressionists were once accused of distorting reality, but today the works of one of the greatest masters of this trend, Claude Monet, are used to obtain data on ecology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists explain this approach to the scrupulous accuracy of the paintings of the French painter.

Claude Monet was fascinated by London. The artist first came to England in September 1870, when he was forced to flee from the hardships of the Franco-Prussian war. It is interesting that most of all in the capital of Great Britain the painter liked what it is customary to scold London for: “Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it great breadth. Its massive buildings look even more grandiose in this mysterious hideout,”Monet shared his impressions.

In 1899-1905, the great impressionist came to London three more times - on family matters and especially for work. The artist, as if enchanted, repeatedly depicted the landscapes of the big city in different lighting. He made sketches from some angles many times. The result of this creative passion was four series of paintings and a lot of pastels - a total of 95 works, which are usually combined into one cycle under the name "London Mists" or simply "London".

Exactly how Monet worked on the series is well known. The artist painted many canvases at the same time. While in London, he clearly planned his work: morning and afternoon were given to bridges, mainly Waterloo Bridge, and evenings to views of Parliament. The American artist John Singer Sargent, visiting his friend during this period, was amazed at how Monet, surrounded by 80 canvases, desperately awaited a suitable atmospheric effect and became very upset when this effect passed unexpectedly quickly. This number of simultaneously executed paintings is probably a record in the history of art.

This huge work came in handy a hundred years later, environmental scientists. It was a great success that Monet kept a detailed diary and described his work in letters almost all the time while working on the paintings. His notes allowed scientists to prove that most of the canvases of the London series were written really in the footsteps of the artist's observations and reflect reality, and are not a figment of the creative imagination. In order to prove this, scientists analyzed the position of the Sun in some pictures. The spiers and towers of the parliament served as markers. Comparing the result with the data of the American Naval Observatory, they calculated the time when the paintings could be painted, and then checked it with the messages of the artist himself.

It turned out that in about half of the canvases studied, the position of the luminary exactly corresponds to the dates of work on the painting, and this most likely means that the artist depicted all other details just as reliably and accurately. The main goal of the study was the very London fog, which the painter admired so much. Now, however, it is customary to call it smog and consider it to be the cause of enormous troubles. Environmentalists expect to find out not only the density of smoke at different times of the day, but also the approximate qualitative composition - what size of particles the Victorian smog consisted of. The latest data can be obtained by examining the color gamut in which it is depicted.

Scientists believe that air pollution was already a serious problem in those years, which people, however, did not fully realize. Systemic studies of the composition of the atmosphere in the 19th century have not yet been conducted, so it is very important to obtain information at least in such an extraordinary way.

Claude Monet admired nature in all its forms. Friends joked that "The garden is his workshop, his palette," and the main source of inspiration for the artist for many years was a small French village.