Wizard of the Butterfly Mark

"One must have the strength for such a fight,” says Monet, with the assurance born of experience, when recounting the history of those troubles days. He is fortunately most generously endowed with the attributes peculiar to the true artistic temperament—those exquisite dreams and reveries which are at once a solace, a pleasure, and a sustaining impetus. Truly was Baudelaire justified in writing: “Nations have great men in spite of themselves, and so have families. They do their best not to have any, so that the great man, in order to exist, must needs possess a power of attack greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of individuals.

Moreover, he is ever keen and restless in search of the new and unexplored, for ever mistrusting the value of his own productions.

Claude Monet is enthusiastically in love with London from the painter’s point of view. From the balconies of the Savoy Hotel the French master has watched the tidal ebb and flow of the great grey river, with its squalid southern banks shrouded day by day in white mist and brown smoke, the warehouses and chimneys coated in a veil of soot, the legacy of ages. The autumnal fogs, which harmonise discordant tones, round off harsh outlines, cloak the ugly and create the beautiful, are to the foreigner London’s greatest charm, although to the inhabitant they are a deadly infliction.