Scientists Confirm Long Held Theory About What Inspired Monet
New HUCE Environmental Fellow Anna Lea Albright and HUCE Faculty Associate Peter Huybers found evidence to confirm the hypothesis that Monet's paintings capture increasingly polluted skies during the Industrial Revolution
By Jacopo Prisco, CNN Style
In a letter to his wife in March 1901, pioneering French painter Claude Monet lamented the bad weather that prevented him from working, as well as another conspicuous impediment to his creativity.
"Everything is as good as dead, no train, no smoke, no boat, nothing to excite the inspiration a little," he wrote.
Monet, now celebrated as a founder of Impressionism, was in London during one of three trips he took to the city between 1899 and 1901, which yielded over 100 paintings. His reference to smoke — which would have come abundantly from the steam engines of boats and trains — as a potential creative spark seems to support a theory long held by some art historians about what was behind the distinctive dreamy haze in Monet's work. Now a recent study by climate scientists has found new evidence to confirm it.
"I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler and Monet paintings at Tate in London and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works," said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University in Paris, in a phone interview. Albright coauthored the study with Peter Huybers, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University.