Monet was in London over the winter of 1870 to 71, as he was avoiding the Franco-Prussian War
in France at the time, and he greatly enjoyed painting in the city.
Over the years afterwards he intended to come back,
but he didn't finally do so until he came back in 1899.
Then he returned in 1900 and 1901. On all three occasions painting from the Savoy hotel.
Well, we're here at the Savoy on the fifth floor, on the riverside,
and these rooms are important because they're the exact rooms that Monet painted from.
Part of the allure for Monet was the balconies, which ran all along the riverfront of the hotel.
Unfortunately they're gone now but at the time they were a fantastic feature
and they meant that you could literally sit outside and paint al fresco, and the views were amazing.
The Savoy suited him very well because it's on a bend on the river,
and Monet got into a pattern of painting different motifs at different times of day.
In the morning he would paint facing eastwards across Waterloo Bridge.
In the late morning and afternoon he would paint facing southwards
down towards Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. And in the late afternoon
he would go to St Thomas's Hospital where he had permission to paint
facing across the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament,
which he would paint with the evening light coming down behind the buildings.
So as far as we know, Monet first came to St Thomas's Hospital,
which is opposite the Houses of Parliament, to paint the sun setting on 13 February 1900.
And one of the first paintings he did was the one which has all that glorious colour in the exhibition,
which obviously inspired him to come back and do up to 19 paintings that have survived today.
And within those 19, nine of them actually have the sun painted in the actual image,
so that we can then use solar geometry to work out
the dates that Monet actually painted those particular images.
Solar geometry is a very simple method
of actually determining the exact position of the sun in the sky.
We have what's called the azimuth, which is a sort of compass direction,
and we have the altitude - the height of the sun in the sky - and with those two numbers
we can work out, for any place in the world,
where the sun would be on any time. So it's like a clock,
a very exact clock, which we can use to date Monet's pictures
pretty exactly within plus or minus a day, and the time within plus or minus a few minutes.
So that very first painting on 13 February 1900,
we can actually date it, but also we can time it
to a quarter to four when he actually first started to paint it.
Each canvas he might work on only for a few minutes
when a particular light effect was there,
and then, as soon as that light effect would change, he would put that canvas down
and a new light effect came, and he would either start a new canvas
or pick up a canvas that had that light effect,
and he would paint on that for a bit.
Sometimes he was painting on ten or more canvases during the course of a day,
but the work on each individual canvas would only be for a few minutes.
The point of this is that the pictures were cumulative;
they were built up over days and months,
and then often reworked in his studio in Giverny.
So some of these pictures were actually worked on over several years,
and the paradox of that is that what he was after was the effect, the 'effet',
of something that had only lasted a few minutes.