What: The French School

Where: McMaster Museum of Art, University Avenue at Sterling Street

When: Until Dec. 13

Phone: 905-525-9140, ext. 23081

A foggy day in London town never got Claude Monet down.

"I adore London," he wrote. "But what I love more than anything is the fog."

The French artist used to paint for months at a time in London - the original Big Smoke - but mostly in the winter, because that's when the fog was worst -- or, for him, the best.

Monet also loved the bridges over the Thames. Around 1900, he began a series of about 40 versions of Waterloo Bridge at different times of the day, in all kinds of weather.

The McMaster Museum of Art owns one of these beauties, and you can see it in The French School, an exhibition showcasing the museum's excellent collection of modern French paintings.

Monet is known as the founding father of Impressionism, which began in the 1870s in Paris. Impressionists rejected traditional art and were consciously looking for something modern.

They took their subjects from contemporary life, rather than from history. They painted in a soft-edged and sketchy style, not a lifelike one. And they left their brushstrokes visible, reminding viewers they were not looking at an illusion of the real world.

London's fog, which cloaked everything in a thick haze, inspired Monet to simplify and unify his compositions. He simplifies by reducing everything to different types of brushstrokes. He unifies by using similar colours all over.

Mauve dominates Waterloo Bridge, done in 1903. Monet paints the water in the spacious foreground with short horizontal brushstrokes loaded with mauve, blue, pink and yellow pigment.

Above the river, the bridge's five stone arches create a rhythmical pattern on a slight diagonal.

Atop the bridge, omnibuses and pedestrians are just tiny clusters of pink, blue and yellow. Yellow dabs on the bridge suggest sun poking through the fog.

In the distance, tall chimneys spew coal smoke into the air, a reminder of London's industrial productivity. A pink wisp of smoke hovers on the left.

Monet's foggy cityscape is an ode to urban beauty.

But when Monet painted Waterloo Bridge, Impressionism was becoming old-fashioned. Younger artists such as Raoul Dufy were experimenting with different ways of expressing themselves.

Small, painterly strokes cover the surface of Monet's work.

By contrast, Dufy in Les Arbres Verts a L'Estaque (1908) opts for larger linear forms that make for a more energetic, brash painting.

Two trees barely hold the centre of the composition. Dark lines -- some sharp, some smudged - enclose their trunks. Leaves are bundled into rounded silk-green shapes. Yellow and gold shapes, both curvy and angular, undulate between the trees.

Dufy creates the look of an unfinished painting by leaving the sides less cluttered than the centre, which looks like it's sucking everything into itself with a great energy.

And some of nature's shapes look a bit industrial. The tree on the left boasts branches that resemble metal machine parts.

Monet loved fog and smoke.

But others were inspired by the machinery that produced it.

Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker and curator, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec .com