Emile Claus

Original canvas. The work is in excellent original condition and ready to hang, with no readily visible retouching under ultraviolet light. Held in a decorative, gold-painted moulded plaster and wood frame.
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Emile Claus took refuge in London during World War I, a period during which he painted many views of the Thames and the Embankment at different times of day (lot 313). In the present work, painted from a position above Victoria Embankment near Waterloo Bridge looking towards the South Bank, Claus explored the effects of the sun rising through the famous London fog, the 'pea soupers', depicting the very particular atmosphere of the great river and its environs. Like Monet, whom he had met in Paris in the late 1880s, Claus abandoned academic naturalism in favour of plein air painting, and in his work became preoccupied with the rendering of atmosphere and light.

Indeed, it is in no small part thanks to Emile Claus that the term Luminism was coined for the proponents of Impressionism in Belgium. As early as 1904 Claus had been instrumental in the formation of the group Vie et Lumière which exhibited with the members of the Libre Esthétique, and paid homage to the old Flemish tradition of light. In an article on the artist in The Studio magazine of 1916 the British art critic Marie Bierme eulogised: 'One dare assert that no other painter of modern times has arrived at a more complete understanding, at a more sincere interpretation of what we may describe as the soul of the sunlight; for no other has loved it more fervently, because no other has striven with more tenacious pertinancy to penetrate its mysteries, to express its beauty at all moments of the day, at all stages of the season.' ('Emile Claus, Painter of Sunshine', The Studio, vol. 66, 1916, p. 79). 

This painting compares to Waterloo Bridge (Musées des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) and to Embankment (Musées des Beaux-Arts, Ghent) (see François Maret, Emile Claus, Antwerp, 1949, pl. 22 & 23).