Monet was not the only French painter to be struck by the smog and smoke of 19th-century London. This painting captures the Thames with a grimly clouded melancholy three decades before Monet started using the Savoy Hotel as a studio. Daubigny had reasons to be cheerless. This Romantic landscape painter of the generation before the impressionists – he was born just two years after the Battle of Waterloo – fled to London at the start of the 1870s to escape the Franco-Prussian war. Monet and other budding impressionists were also in London at the same time, for the same reason. Evidently there was something truly compelling about the capital of the world’s first industrial nation that haunted and transfixed French eyes.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk