River of Impressionist inspiration

The English painter, Joseph Mallord William Turner, so loved the Thames that he bought a house in Chelsea with commanding views of the river. To satisfy his fascination, he watched its waters in the magical hours of dawn and dusk from a rowing boat or a rooftop balcony. On the day of his death, in December 1851, Turner was found lying on the floor of his bedroom, trying to reach the window so as to see the river, writes Lara Marlowe

The Thames is the leitmotif of Turner Whistler Monet, the main exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, this season. All three painters returned repeatedly to the river, abandoning their early realism to transform the basic elements of water, air and fiery sunsets into poetic visions.

Ironically, the soot and smoke of industrial-age London created the atmospherics the painters so loved, especially the violent sunsets. Monet feared fine weather when the factories shut down on Sunday.

"On getting up, I was terrified to see there was no fog, not even a trace of mist; I was annihilated," he wrote to his wife, Alice.

Monet sometimes used the English Channel and the Seine as substitutes, but it is revealing that the canvas which gave its name to Impressionism - Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1872-3, was mistaken by the critic, Ernest Chesneau, for a "sunrise over the Thames".

With its zig-zagging reflection of the sun's rays on water, Impression so resembles Turner's Scarlet Sunset: A Town on a River, painted some four decades earlier, that one could be forgiven for wondering whether Monet copied Turner.

Long after the word "impressionism" ceased to be an insult, Monet explained to La Revue Illustrée how the term was coined: "I'd sent [to the 1874 exhibition] a thing done at Le Havre, from my window, of the sun in the mist . . . They asked me for the title for the catalogue. It couldn't really be called a view of Le Havre, so I said: 'Put Impression.' They made Impressionism out of it, and the jokes started."

This ambitious exhibition was organised by the Musée d'Orsay, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Tate Gallery in London. It is meant to celebrate the centenary of the entente cordiale between France and Britain by showing how deeply Britain and France influenced each other. But it asks a question that makes some French curators apoplectic: was Turner, not Monet, the first Impressionist painter?

French historians point out that Turner's favourite painter, Claude Lorrain, was a 17th-century French landscape artist (Turner asked that his paintings be hung beside Lorrain's in the National Gallery after his death). Lorrain's influence - sky-filled canvases suffused with morning or evening sunlight - is obvious in the early Turners at the Grand Palais.

Turner supporters can nonetheless point to a great deal of evidence that the English painter invented Impressionism. Monet's own biographer called him "the French Turner". Henri Matisse called Turner "the link between tradition and Impressionism" and said he "found a great similarity of construction through colour between Turner's watercolours and the paintings of Claude Monet". The Belgian, Émile Verhaeren, wrote in 1885 that "the seeds of the recent techniques of the French Impressionists, of Claude Monet and his school . . . are found in Turner's oeuvre . . . A half-century before Manet, Claude Monet and Renoir, might Turner, perhaps, have created the Impressionist school?".

Monet seems to have had mixed feelings about Turner. But a letter sent by the core group of Impressionists to London's Grosvenor Gallery in the early 1880s undermines France's claim to have invented Impressionism. "A group of French painters, united by the same aesthetic tendencies, struggling for 10 years against convention and routine . . . cannot forget that it has been preceded in this path by a great master of the English school, the illustrious Turner," the painters wrote.

The exhibition includes only three of Turner's large "impressionist" canvases. Junction of the Severn and the Wye and Sun Setting over a Lake hang in the first room, magnificently. It is disappointing that there are so few large oils by Turner, especially when one thinks that he left 20,000 works of art to the National Gallery. (To be fair, Turner's exquisite watercolours of Lake Lucerne and Venice are generously represented, but it's a challenge to enjoy smaller works in a crowded museum.) These two oils from the early 1840s remind us how far ahead of his time Turner was.

The reaction of writer Hippolyte Taine, on visiting London in 1871, was representative of France's artistic conservatism on the eve of the Impressionist revolution. Turner's later paintings "degenerated into lunacy . . . compose an extraordinary jumble, a sort of churned foam", he wrote. "Place a man in a fog, in the midst of a storm, the sun in his eyes, and his head swimming, and depict if you can his impressions on canvas; these are the gloomy visions, the vagueness, the delirium of an imagination that becomes deranged through over-straining."

The third Turner oil painting on show, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, hangs towards the end of the exhibition, in a room with 11 Monets of the Houses of Parliament in the Sunset. Thirty years have passed since the French painter (inadvertently?) imitated Turner, but similarities in palette and composition are still striking.

The idea of a Turner-Monet exhibition is at least 100 years old. In July 1904, critic Gustave Kahn wrote: "One would understand placing certain Monets beside certain Turners . . . It would bring two dates of Impressionism together. Or rather, since the names of schools can be misleading . . . it would bring together two dates in the history of visual sensibility."

Whistler was an uprooted American who spent part of his childhood in Russia with his father, a civil engineer. He introduced Monet to the London art world - and probably to the work of Turner. Though he was a teenager when Turner died, Whistler harboured boundless admiration for Turner, whose work he began copying at the age of 20, when he was expelled from West Point.

James Whistler studied painting in Paris, and moved between Paris and London throughout his adult life. Like Turner before him, he lived beside the Thames so he could paint from his window. When his wife, Beatrice, was dying in 1896, Whistler rented a room in the Savoy so she could watch the river while he drew it. A few years later, on Whistler's recommendation, his friend, Monet, also took a room on the sixth floor of the Savoy.

Monet is believed to have met Whistler during his first trip to London in 1870. The French painter, accompanied by Pissarro, had fled Paris to escape conscription during the Franco-Prussian war. It is likely that Monet saw Whistler's Nocturnes, ethereal silhouettes of the Thames and the buildings of London, with a few pinpricks of light. The Nocturnes were influenced by the Impressionists' love of Japanese art, and were a theme Whistler returned to in Venice.

All three painters were inspired by Venice. Though Monet, the last to visit "the floating city", used Turner's and Whistler's technique of painting from a gondola, there is little beyond the obvious themes to connect Turner's watercolours, Whistler's etchings and Monet's oil paintings. It is possible, though not certain, that Monet took his habit of doing series of paintings of the same subject from Turner. Monet's Venetian palaces recall his cathedral series; weightless, pastry-like stone suffused with purple-blue light.

In their lifetimes, Turner, Whistler and Monet were criticised for the "unfinished" quality of their paintings. In the artistic cause célèbre of 1878, Whistler sued the art critic, John Ruskin, for defamation after the latter accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" by painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Though Whistler won a symbolic farthing in damages, his health and finances were ruined by the lawsuit. With the Impressionists, planning fell by the wayside.

"A landscape is but an impression that the brush must seize in subtle harmonies, in its instantaneousness," Monet wrote.

He refused to sketch, preferring to capture a moment directly on canvas with paint. The permanence conveyed by realist painters died. In its stead, the world gained the most beautiful urban landscapes in the history of art.

Turner Whistler Monet is at Le Grand Palais until January 17th, 2005. Information: 00331-44131717. The exhibition opens at the Tate Gallery, London, on February 12th. www.rmn.fr/turner-whistler-monet