Claude monet's views of thames on show in london

Thirty years after his first visit in 1899, he came back and now he was a very wealthy man, able to afford the Savoy Hotel right on the Thames, and he had long wanted to paint what he called some fog effects on the Thames, and he was able to do so at the turn of the century. Monet absolutely loved London, and indeed he said he loved London most in the wintertime, because it just had this incredible effect. The fog merged with the smoke belching from the factories on the south bank, with the steam of the trains passing over the bridges, with indeed with the steamboats on the river, and all of that with gusts of wind kind of mixed together to create this incredible kind of shroud and veil, and Monet absolutely loved that, and he said that the challenge was to capture those effects. He said they were extraordinary effects, but none lasting more than five minutes. The fog, he loved the fact that it blurred everything, it blurred the line between water and sky, and so that really, I think, empowered him when he came back to France. He actually, that's when he started working on his Water Lily series, murals, but without London, without this experience of the Thames, that series would never have happened.