Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet (prior to cleaning)
In June, I wrote about how the Courtauld Gallery will open an exhibition dedicated to Claude Monet’s London paintings. The exhibition will open this Friday, September 27th, but not before gallery and National Trust specialists make some last-minute changes. This includes fully restoring a painting previously caked in decades of cigar smoke from its prior owner, Sir Winston Churchill.
Monet had an interesting relationship with London. He first traveled there in 1870, mainly to escape the Franco-Prussian War. The city’s galleries and museums exposed him to the art of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, influencing how he would execute his later landscapes. Monet later painted in London, creating around a hundred paintings over several visits, mainly showing spots on the River Thames, such as the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge. Starting September 27th, the Courtauld Gallery will exhibit a collection of twenty-one paintings to recreate the artist’s plans for exhibiting these paintings in London in 1905. One of these works, however, had to undergo substantial cleaning and restoration because of its previous owner, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.
The painting from Churchill’s collection was mostly completed in 1902, but Monet made small changes here and there over many years before he sold it in 1923. The painting looks southwest down the Thames towards Charing Cross Bridge, with the faintest hint of Big Ben on the right-hand side in the distance. Today, Charing Cross Bridge is used mainly for rail, with two additional pedestrian bridges on either side opening in 2002. Churchill kept the Monet in the drawing room of his country estate in Kent, Chartwell House. He received it for his 75th birthday in 1949 from his friend and literary agent, Emery Reves. In a letter, Reves wishes Churchill a good year, during which he appropriately wishes he “will dissipate the fog that shrouds Westminster.” Churchill was Leader of the Opposition at the time and would live up to Reves’s wishes, winning the 1951 elections and regaining the position of Prime Minister. After Churchill died in 1965, his widow Clementine gave Chartwell and its contents to the National Trust, marking the first time Charing Cross Bridge was part of a public collection. But even then, the Monet remained little-known, with it even missing from Daniel Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné published in 1985.
Over the decades, smoke from fireplaces and the thousands of cigars Churchills smoked each year gradually darkened the painting’s varnish until the subtleties of the color became more difficult to notice. Rebecca Hellen, a conservator for the National Trust, posed for a photo with the mostly-cleaned Monet. The bottom-left corner of the canvas remained uncleaned in the photo to show the differences in color. As one of only two Monet London paintings in British public collections, the Churchill Monet is a particularly consequential loan for the Courtauld Gallery to secure. Monet and London: Views of the Thames will be on display at the Courtauld Gallery from September 27, 2024 to January 19, 2025.