Edward Lucie-Smith reviews Claude Monet & Architecture at The National Gallery, London, on view through July 29, 2018.

Lucie-Smith observes: “One of the most interesting things about the show, at a time when social and political virtue-signalling have become primary subjects for art, is that, where themes of this kind are concerned, Monet is studiously neutral… The pollution that veils London’s Thameside buildings and bridges is, for Monet, a fascinating phenomenon, not least because it was something visually novel …Yet his attitude towards these effects is sedulously neutral… Monet, of course, was a revolutionary in his own right, but the revolution he wished to bring about was strictly a revolution in seeing.”