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The Bridge at Hampton Court by Alfred Sisley (1874), which appears in Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870–1904).
The Bridge at Hampton Court by Alfred Sisley (1874), which appears in Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870–1904). Photograph: Wallraf Richartz Museum & Foundation Corboud, Cologne
The Bridge at Hampton Court by Alfred Sisley (1874), which appears in Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870–1904). Photograph: Wallraf Richartz Museum & Foundation Corboud, Cologne

Pissarro in Norwood, Monet at the Savoy: what the exiled impressionists saw in London

This article is more than 6 years old

Many great artists found refuge in London after fleeing tumult in France. Their sensational landscapes – beautifully capturing its streets, waters and winter snows – are the highlight of a major new exhibition at Tate Britain

Commemorative plaques on buildings frequently take us by surprise, providing an immediate bridge to the past. This is particularly so with foreign visitors to these shores who gained international reputations. There is a plaque on a house in Ramsgate where Vincent van Gogh lived briefly in 1876. In London, despite the blitz and constant redevelopment, there are still rich pickings – Canaletto in Soho, the boy Mozart in Ebury Street, Chopin in St James’s Place, Van Gogh, again, in Stockwell, Kurt Schwitters in Barnes and Picasso in Covent Garden, where a non-blue plaque, easily missed, on a warehouse in Floral Street proclaims his painting there of the scenery for Ballets Russes’s The Three-Cornered Hat in 1919. Picasso stayed at the Savoy and knew that Claude Monet had stayed there too, to paint the the Thames from its windows.

Tate Britain’s forthcoming show Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870-1904) explores in detail the residence of many French painters and sculptors in London, especially Monet and Camille Pissarro, who came in 1870-71 to escape the Franco-Prussian war, with France defeated at Sedan and the subsequent Paris Commune.

It was not difficult to do – you caught a cross-Channel boat, arrived by train in London and settled wherever you could, usually finding lodgings through French émigrés already in the city. No passports or visas or border controls: France and Britain were allies. Some had means to live; others were “economic migrants”, hoping for sales and commissions while the Paris art market stalled. Monet fled France to avoid conscription; Pissarro arrived to escape the Prussians in his village of Louveciennes (where in fact many of his stored paintings were destroyed as well as a number by Monet, ironically left there for safe-keeping).

Houses of Parliament by Claude Monet, 1903. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

For many years it was thought that Alfred Sisley, a British citizen born in Paris, had joined his colleagues in London but documents show this was not the case. His house in Bougival, near Paris, was ruined and he lost all his work. He was to come to London three years later, with wonderful results.

Monet, with his wife and son, lodged in Bath Place, part of the west end of Kensington High Street and close to the French landscape painter Charles Daubigny. Pissarro with Julie Vellay (they married in Croydon register office in 1871) and their two children settled in Norwood, close to the painter’s mother who had already fled France with other members of her family. He arrived in late 1870, in time for the first winter snow, which he almost immediately painted, making the still partly rural Upper Norwood look poignantly like Louveciennes. A handful of London landscapes by Monet (and one interior with his wife Camille) and views in the London suburbs (Sydenham, Dulwich) by Pissarro are included in the Tate’s show.

It should be remembered that the term impressionism was only coined in 1874 and both artists were still exploring the implications of this new style. The Monets, in particular, are subdued and lack the dash and sparkle even of works from his previous seaside summer at Trouville. London life for these two great figures was inhibiting. They were dépaysé – removed from their habitual suroundings. Fortunately, their experience did not prevent them from returning in later years, Pissarro happily working in Kew and Monet painting his sensational series of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament, many from his room at the Savoy.

So, beware the exhibition’s title, some of the artists were self-imposed exiles. But what of the majority of the figures represented here? Are you familiar with the work of Alphonse Legros? You certainly will be after you have visited the show. Legros had come to London in 1863 with some reputation as a realist painter, portraitist and etcher. He was generously welcoming to the émigrés for whom he was an early port of call. Later he became an influential teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art; he seems to have learned scarcely any English although he had an English wife; and he died in Watford in 1911.

The trouble with placing him so bulkingly at the heart of the exhibition is that as an artist he was a competent, honourable bore.

Also substantially represented is James Tissot, another but different kind of bore – a famous one whose work is still familiar from greetings cards and paperback covers of classic novels. He had stronger links with some of the impressionist group (he was memorably painted by Degas) and was also influenced, less profoundly, by the rage for Japonisme. He was certainly an exile, having mildly supported the Paris Commune, but one who remained in London for the next decade, living in increasing affluence in St John’s Wood.

The Ball on Shipboard by James Tissot c1874. Photograph: Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest/Tate

His contemporary figure scenes and portraits of the well-to-do appealed to English collectors. There’s a twist of Degas, a pinch from Manet, a whole subject from Whistler, all ironed flat by his noncommittal brushwork. He could be striking without being offensive – perfect for English taste. From his depictions of well-heeled evening parties and receptions, you could calculate which side of Belgrave Square these long-waisted girls came from. But for Henry James, he was “hard, vulgar and banal” and Ruskin dismissed his work as “coloured photographs of vulgar society”. He has more to offer the historian of costume than the historian of art.

Nevertheless, his well-known, amusing portrait of Captain Burnaby, a scarlet stripe running the length of his military leg, is always worth a look. And his forlorn study of the exiled Empress Eugénie and her son the Prince Imperial, on an autumn day in their refuge in Chislehurst, Kent, is a pertinent loan.

The sculptor Jules Dalou was a fervent communard who, after the bloody suppression of the Commune, escaped to London in July 1871, only returning to Paris in 1880 after he was officially pardoned in the general amnesty. He was an influential teacher in London and gained numerous commissions, one of the finest being his Maternity, a bronze woman and child, placed outdoors close to the Stock Exchange, and still one of the best public sculptures in the city.

Queen Victoria commissioned him to make a monument to two dead granddaughters for her private chapel at Windsor. With Legros and another French-born sculptor, Édouard Lantéri, Dalou had a decisive and long-lasting impact on the training of art students in London. All this is thoroughly documented in the show.

After this pottering in the outhouses of French art – and British reactions to the work of these visitors – the show’s last sections look at the fruits of later visits by Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. But there is one aspect of this moment in history that is hardly addressed, a topic much chewed over for a century and more, of the impact of British landscape painting on the future impressionists.

They visited the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Royal Academy (where Monet’s and Pissarro’s submissions were rejected) and innumerable dealers. They admired, above all, the landscapes of Crome, Constable and Turner. What they would actually have been able to see has been pretty well established but Monet and Pissarro, in particular, left somewhat confusing accounts of any impact these works may have had.

Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio by JMW Turner. Pissarro recommended the Turners he had seen in the museums to his son. Photograph: Frank Baron/The Guardian

An early source for this problem was some articles and a pioneering 1904 book, Impressionist Painting by Wynford Dewhurst. He was a surprising, early convert to the movement, a painter as well as a writer, who worshipped at the shrine of Monet’s Giverny and was in correspondence with Pissarro. This was unusual from a Buckingham county councillor and, later, a Tunbridge Wells special constable in the first world war. His patriotism went further: he insisted on the major influence of British art, especially Turner, on the incipient impressionists. Pissarro was aggrieved. For him, impressionism flowed naturally from the French landscape tradition, from Claude to Corot. He admired Constable and Turner as exemplary pioneers rather than direct influences, and it is true that it is difficult to discern any Turnerisms in his work.

But Pissarro later recommended the Turners he had seen in the museums to his son Lucien, by then living in London. With Monet it is hard not to detect Turner behind some of the later Thames scenes of Westminster and Charing Cross Bridge. Yet he also recorded his disenchantment with Turner as too exuberantly romantic. In spite of this, both painters signed a letter, along with Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot and others, sent to London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, proclaiming their homage to Turner as “un grand maître de l’école anglaise”. This rarely quoted document could not be clearer in its admiration.

Sisley had spent three years in London before he decided to become a painter, working in his family’s import-export business in the City. He was certainly struck by the works of Turner but it is surely Constable who came to influence him years later and with whom he has affinities of temperament and sensibility. In 1874 (the year of the first impressionist exhibition) he came again to London and settled down to paint the Thames at Hampton Court and East Molesey. Three of this superb series are included in the show, with The Bridge at Hampton Court an undisputed masterpiece of early impressionism.

Might it not have been possible for the exhibition’s curators to have included a few works by Constable and Turner that the impressionists would have seen in London in the 1870s?

Of these artists’ great contemporaries, Cézanne never travelled beyond France but Renoir came on a visit that, as one might expect, was entirely devoted to pleasure. It was long known that he had come to London in the 1880s but it is only recently that the visit has been pinned down to May 1882, through a cache of letters from the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, an uber-Anglophile, to his parents in Paris. With a gang of friends, Renoir went to the museums, to the Derby at Epsom in terrible rain, visited friendly collectors (and Whistler) and, intending to work, tried unsuccessfully to find models.

He seems to have had no rapport with English art, not even with Turner, save for the work of Richard Parkes Bonington who, however, had spent much of his short life in France where he had considerable influence. Renoir (who was “dazzled” by London) stayed at the Hotel Dieudonné in Ryder Street, St James’s, which became a notable meeting place for French visitors.

It is worth mentioning (although his work is not in the show) an artist from the younger generation who loved the city: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He visited on several occasions, staying at the Charing Cross Hotel and going to the West End music halls. To his chagrin, he just missed Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee festivities in 1897 but planned to rush to London for her funeral “when La Queen consents to die”. In 1901 she did, but he was too ill to travel and died only a few months later.

As a coda to the show there are three paintings by André Derain, from 1906-07. Neither an impressionist nor an exile, Derain was a young turk of the Fauvist movement. The Thames is red, then green or sparkling in gold below a pink sky. Monet’s mists loiter in distant blues, but with smoke, cranes and river traffic in a clanging, explosive playground of colour. We have crashed into the 20th century.

This article was amended on 23 October 2017. An earlier version said that the the exhibition ends with four works by Derain. This has been corrected to say three.

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