Monet has never been seen at his best in England; indeed, the same may be said of all the members of the Impressionist group. Owing to the ready market for their work in France and America, it is rarely that the dealers are able to attract across the Channel any but second-rate canvases. Isolated works have been shown at the Boussod Vallodon galleries, the New English Art Club, the International Society’s Exhibition at Knightsbridge, and a miscellaneous collection on view at the Hanover Gallery, Bond Street, in 1901. The standard of the latter was not high, and the result disappointing to all parties. A representative exhibition remains to be held. No other country but France can boast of landscape so varied, so picturesque, and so atmospherically suited to the Impressionist. The principal scenes of Monet’s labours have been Havre, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the Riviera, La Creuse, La Manche, with Giverny and the Seine valley in particular. Short visits have been devoted to England, Norway, and Holland; but the first-named localities have seen the production of the famous series known under the titles of _Les Meules_, _Peupliers au bord de l’Epté_, _Glaçons sur la Seine_, _Matins sur la Seine_, _A Argenteuil_, _Belle Isle_, _Bordighera_, _Antibes_, _Champs des Tulipes_, and _Les Cathédrales._ There is also a series of paintings of the artist’s Japanese water-garden at Giverny, and yet another series dealing with London under different atmospheric aspects. Claude Monet is enthusiastically in love with London from the painter’s point of view. From the balconies of the Savoy Hotel the French master has watched the tidal ebb and flow of the great grey river, with its squalid southern banks shrouded day by day in white mist and brown smoke, the warehouses and chimneys coated in a veil of soot, the legacy of ages. The autumnal fogs, which harmonise discordant tones, round off harsh outlines, cloak the ugly and create the beautiful, are to the foreigner London’s greatest charm, although to the inhabitant they are a deadly infliction. [Illustration: LA GRENOUILLÈRE · CLAUDE MONET ] No writer ever expressed this fascination more eloquently than the “Wizard of the Butterfly Mark,” who wrote: “And when the evening mist clothes the riverside world with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see; and Nature, who, for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.”