Influenced by the art of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Emile Claus painted his first works in a naturalistic style.A regular visitor of Paris, he was inspired by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and gradually adopted a freer brushstroke which he combined with vivid colours. In the 1890s, Claus painted large, bright landscapes of the Belgian countryside. His official collaboration with the Parisian Gallery Georges Petit in1900 increased his fame, making him the most famous Belgian painter of his time.
In 1915, as the war raged in Belgium, Claus went to London to create a series of views of the Thames.In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of Claude Monet, who had painted the English river multiple times between 1899 and 1905. In a letter dated 20 April 1915, Claus expressed his desire to give a “unique theme to these canvases, unique yet different: the Thames”. At that time, his studio was located on the 4th floor of Mowbray House, at the corner of Embankment and Norfolk Street, with windows overlooking the Waterloo and Westminster bridges. In 1917, Claus held his first exhibition on this subject, titled Reverberations on the Thames, at the Goupil Gallery in London. The show, which was accompanied by a catalogue, featured91 works. The artist returned to Belgium in 1919, where he passed away in 1924 after a final retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Giroux.
On our sheet drawn in London in 1915, a swirling sequence of charcoal dashes define a mysterious environment. In his own reinterpretation of Seurat’s graphic technique, Claus plays with positive and negative space to craftily render the smoothly suggested representation of figures, carriages, and light posts, ultimately recreating the foggy, mystical ambience of a London street at night.