ABSTRACT
One person’s goal is another person’s point of departure: it is about getting there and coming back. Modern conditions mean that some will bustle along on foot and others get there faster in an omnibus. The rumbling city is all around at the edges. Monet, a name for a set of procedures, is of course central to the modernist project, and London in 1900 is the site of modernity. Perception and memory are brought together in the London series, incongruously by the banks of the Seine. While British painters looked for permanence, for timeless representations, which expressed essential national values, the world was as changeling as Monet’s weather in the early months of 1901. And the incidents at the margin, such as the war with the Boers and the funeral spectacle of Queen Victoria — the promontories of British national consciousness — were things that go on in the newspapers.
