London calling | 26 October 2017

Madame Monet was bored. Wouldn’t you have been? Exiled to London in the bad, cold winter of 1870–71. In rented rooms above Shaftesbury Avenue, with a three-year-old son in tow, a husband who couldn’t speak English, and no money coming in. Every day roast beef and potatoes and fog, fog, fog choking the city. ‘Brouillardopolis’, French writers called it. Camille Monet had offered to give language lessons, but when she hadn’t a pupil — and Claude hadn’t a commission — she let him paint her, listless on a chaise-longue, book unread on her lap. Her malaise was ‘l’exilité’ — the low, homesick spirits of the French in England. ‘Meditation, Mrs Monet Sitting on a Sofa’ (1871) sets the scene for Tate Britain’s autumn exhibition Impressionists in London, which gathers works by the French artists who fled the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the short-lived Paris Commune for London. Monet captures his wife looking out of the window, remembering, perhaps, their honeymoon in Trouville just a few months before, and wondering if they would ever go home to France.

Still, it could have been worse. The Monets could have been in Paris, sawing the stair bannisters for firewood, queuing for rations, trading recipes with fearful, hungry neighbours for rats-en-ragoût. Gustave Moreau, after hearing France declare war on Prussia on 19 July 1870, had holed himself up in his studio on the rue de la Rochefoucauld with his mother, twitching at every bombardment. Henri Fantin-Latour had buried himself in the cellar at the start of the Siege of Paris on 19 September, and wouldn’t emerge until after the end of the Commune on28 May 1871. Jean-François Millet had fled to Gruchy, a hamlet near Cherbourg, and Paul Cézanne to L’Estaque near Marseilles.

The painters Gustave Doré, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and James Tissot were all serving in the National Guard.