Leicester Square, la nuit

Monet painted almost nothing at night, which makes this one strange. He was in London over the winters around 1900 and 1901, mostly obsessed with fog on the Thames from his window at the Savoy Hotel. Leicester Square he seems to have looked down on from a balcony after dark, and what caught him was the new electric lighting, smeared into blurred haloes of yellow and green over a crowd he barely bothers to draw. There is almost no detail, just light dissolving in the damp London air. He carried the canvas back to France unfinished and worked it up later from memory. It ended up far from London, in the collection of the Swiss collector Jean Planque, which since 2026 has been on deposit at the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, on Lake Geneva.