Monet the Astronomer?

Oct 8, 2006 Alun Science, The Past 2 Comments Archaeoastronomy, Art, Art History, History, London, Monet, Saint Thomas's Hospital

Monet’s Houses of Parliament

Is Monet’s paint­ing of the Houses of Par­lia­ment above an accur­ate paint­ing of Lon­don? The story that it could well be broke in August but I’ve delayed com­ment­ing on it because I wanted to sit down with the ori­ginal paper.

A Picasso, so it could be anything.

I tend to be scep­tical of claims that art can be read sci­en­tific­ally. For instance does this really look much like a woman with a gui­tar? The Monet paper had the added prob­lem of stat­ing that the time of paint­ing could be dated. Astro­nomy is usu­ally a ter­rible way to date things. It really only works if you already know the period of the thing you’re dat­ing, which is why the paper ‘Solar pos­i­tion within Monet’s Houses of Par­lia­ment’ by Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes makes a lot of sense. It’s an example of good inter­dis­cip­lin­ary thinking.

The reason it works so well is that Baker and Thornes are able to use his­tor­ical mater­ial to elim­in­ate a lot of spec­u­la­tion. Monet’s life is well stud­ied and many of his let­ters sur­vive, so they are able to place the period dur­ing which Monet was in Lon­don. To exam­ine the paint­ing more closely they also needed to cal­cu­late where Monet’s vant­age point was. This was made easier as they knew the build­ing he was in, Saint Thomas’s Hos­pital. Using archi­tec­tural draw­ings and Monet’s descrip­tion of the room they had a set of likely can­did­ates. They then tried to match this to the view from the paint­ing.

The view of Par­lia­ment from across the river today.

Unsur­pris­ingly they found the scale wasn’t entirely lin­ear, which means that parts were com­pressed or stretched, but not fant­ast­ic­ally so. Allow­ing for prob­lems with shadow and back­light­ing they found that Monet’s paint­ings were a reas­on­able match. This gave them the tools they needed to put a time to the paint­ings. The build­ing pro­file placed Monet on a second floor covered ter­race of the former Governor’s Hall at the hos­pital and this is cor­rob­or­ated with the his­tor­ical evid­ence which says he wanted to be out­doors to paint.

The part I struggled with most was fix­ing a spe­cific time to the paint­ing and that’s because I’m a ter­rible painter and know next to noth­ing about art. Baker and Thornes have read round this too, and have found that it took Monet about forty-five minutes to paint some of his smal­ler paint­ings. This means lar­ger ones like the one above which are about two and a half times big­ger should take two and a half times longer. They acknow­ledge this, but they are also able to make some obser­va­tions about the paint­ing process.

One is that Monet prob­ably didn’t start paint­ing with a blank can­vas. Instead he’ll have had a sketch of the Houses of Par­lia­ment already on the can­vas and he’d fill in the col­ours as the time to paint came. The other is that the actual sun bit would only require a few minutes to paint. Indeed with it mov­ing a con­sid­er­able dis­tance he couldn’t dawdle while paint­ing it. The third point which clinches it for me is that they also show through the his­tor­ical evid­ence that he came back to Lon­don later to try and fin­ish some of the paint­ings. He was aware the effects of the light would only be sim­ilar for a few days in the year and that’s what he was after and so why he had returned. That pretty much makes it cer­tain that tim­ing was import­ant to the paint­ings. he made and would sug­gest they were done in Lon­don rather than filled out from ima­gin­a­tion at home.

The paper cer­tainly makes a strong argu­ment that Monet com­pleted his work from obser­va­tion in Lon­don. Baker and Thornes now argue that if the pos­i­tion­ing is accur­ate, how should we inter­pret the col­our­ing? It seems odd to sug­gest he went to all that trouble to make the paint­ing accur­ate and then decided to make the sun a blood­ier red. Sim­il­arly there’s a depth to the shad­ows which may indic­ate effects of atmo­spheric pol­lu­tion. i thought the swir­li­ness was a Monet thing, but if you com­pare it so some of his other work like Das Seine­becken bei Argen­teuil or Der Bach von Robec (see below) there’s a lot of unne­ces­sary grim­ness in the Par­lia­ment paint­ing, unless the view the short dis­tance across the river was indeed grim.

More Monet from Wikipedia.

I’d have to talk to a chem­ist to see if there really was much hope of identi­fy­ing sub­stances from spec­tral ana­lysis like the paper authors claim. I’m open to the idea it might be pos­sible as the authors have shown care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion the the num­ber of dif­fer­ent dis­cip­lines they’ve used. Regard­less, it does seem Monet has very accur­ately illus­trated the real­ity of liv­ing in an indus­trial city at the end of the nine­teenth century.