PARIS, FRANCE.-The exhibition "Turner, Whistler, Monet" has attracted some 400,000 visitors, around 6.000 daily, to admire the works of the three great painters at the Grand Palais in Paris. At the end of 1870, Claude Monet moved to London to escape the Franco-Prussian war. He was thirty at the time and stayed in London for several months. There he discovered the work of William Turner (1775-1851), especially the paintings the artist had bequeathed to the British nation, which were on show in the National Gallery. At the same period he probably visited the studio of James Whistler (1834-1903) and may well have seen the American artist’s earliest Nocturnes. As a very young man, on one of his first visits to London, Whistler, too, had been intrigued by Turner’s work. Monet may also have seen Whistler’s etchings of the Thames produced between 1859 and 1861 and published as a set in spring 1871. Whatever the case may be, the French artist painted three views of the Thames wreathed in fog during his stay.

The works of Turner and Whistler certainly had an influence, although it is hard to define, on the man who later became the prime mover of the Impressionist movement, especially on the famous Impression Sunrise (Paris, Musée Marmottan-Monet), a view of the Seine at Le Havre painted in 1872-1873, whose title, by derision, became the name of the new art movement. A steadfast friendship later developed between Whistler and Monet and they helped each other exhibit their works in London and Paris. Thanks to Monet, Parisians had an opportunity to see a collection of Whistler’s paintings, watercolours and pastels at the International Exhibition at the Georges Petit gallery in May-June 1887; and thanks to Whistler, Monet’s paintings were admired by Londoners at the Royal Society of British Artists in November-December of the same year.