When a museum mounts an exhibition around a dozen fabulous Monets, as the Brooklyn Museum has done with the traveling show “Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames (1859-1914),” box-office success is guaranteed. Yet Impressionist paintings – with their softened, quivering contours and soothing, dappled light – though almost universally loved, make it difficult for us to see Impressionism for what it was originally.

We are nearly as distant now from the birth of Impressionism as we are from the birth of the Industrial Revolution, which brought it on. We cannot imagine what it was like to see a Monet painting as his contemporaries saw it – just as we cannot know what it was like to see the first locomotive, horseless carriage, or flying contraption.

In today’s faster-paced computer age, the pretty-colored, dizzying brushstrokes of Impressionism can seem to be calming, almost nostalgic. They take us back to nature and remind us of simpler times, in art and elsewhere. We must remind ourselves that Impressionism – compositions made of individual nervous strokes in a state of constant flux – is an art born of the experience of the rapid speed, continual change, and anxiety of the modern city. It is an art closer in spirit to Paris, London, or New York than to the forest of Fontainebleau.

Impressionist painters, modernists that they were, understood that there is no more lonely place to be than alone in a crowd, where your own sense of isolation is thrown back in your face continually (this is why New Yorkers, if they are single, dine in on Valentine’s Day).Whether the Impressionists were in the city or the country, they painted not the scenery per se, but their response to the changing world around them.

Impressionism is often thought to be a movement invented by the French in the idyllic French countryside. Certainly the French did Impressionism better than anyone else, and some of their greatest paintings are landscapes, but the movement began in London. Impressionism’s seeds can be found in the atmospheric and hazy tumults, many of them seascapes, of J.M.W. Turner and, later, in the etchings and paintings, especially the nocturnes, that James McNeill Whistler did along the River Thames.

During the 19th century, London was the largest, busiest, most industrial, and exotic port city in the West. Goods came to London, via the River Thames, from all over the world. By the 1850s, the river was crowded with steam and clipper ships, merchants and factory chimneys, docks, bridges, shipbuilders, and warehouses. It was also filthy, smelly with raw sewage, and steaming with fog and smog, which transformed it into a haze of brilliantly colored atmosphere and light.

This was the Thames that captivated many artists, initially Whistler, who moved to London in 1859 and began his “Thames Set,” an influential suite of etchings, six of which are included in “Monet’s London.” Some of these plates, of boats and bridges and dockworkers, were worked on directly at the riverside, and they convey an urgency and a genuine engagement with the river, as if the artist were doing a series of portraits. “Billingsgate,” of a group of close-knit, swaying masts along the docks, and “Limehouse” (both 1859) give us a snapshot of the life along the Thames.

“Monet’s London” opens with Whistler’s strong oil painting “The Last of Old Westminster” (1862). A densely packed work, in mostly sepias under a dusty blue sky, of workers on the bridge, the canvas is surprisingly airy and open. Also in the first gallery is Daubigny’s oil “St. Paul’s From the Surrey Side” (1873), a dark and heavy foreground of long, black moored boats, which contrasts strikingly with the brushy, bluish-brown mist of the distant bridge and cathedral dome. In the middle ground, a boat’s tiny, bright red smokestack punctuates the entire canvas, bringing out every pink in the painting’s docks, boats, river, and sky.

The Thames is the subject of every work in “Monet’s London,” and the exhibition includes approximately 150 artworks by nearly 50 artists. The show – overflowing with photographs, prints, drawings, paintings, and maps of the river – is documentary, almost scholarly in feel. Although it feels more like a gathering of images around a theme than a fully engaged exploration of its subject, it offers numerous surprises and allows for comparisons between photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings of familiar landmarks by different artists over a 50-year period. We are given a wide view of a specific time and place that is out of reach to us.

But none of this really matters when you come to the heart and soul of the show: a suite of drawings and paintings Monet did of the Thames between 1899 and 1904 – a couple of exhilarating, curving galleries that wind through the center of the mostly monochromatic show, like a summer garden in the middle of winter.

Paintings from Monet’s three series “Charing Cross Bridge,” “Waterloo Bridge,” and “Houses of Parliament,” seen in different light and climate (at sunset; in fog; in sunlight; in overcast light; with reflections; with boats; with the effect of sun and smoke) are grouped together. The delicious range of color, atmosphere, and density in the paintings – yellow/violet, blue/orange, red/green; milky, silvery, liquid, or ashen; sparkling like satin; flashing like diamonds – keeps your eyes bouncing not only from color change to color change but from canvas to canvas and subject to subject. Monet titles the paintings as if he were a scientist collecting specimens of fog and sun, yet the experience is anything but scientific. The paintings’ dazzlingly elusive forms – some of the greatest Impressionism has to offer – put your senses on a razor’s edge.

Two great Fauve paintings by Andre Derain (both 1906) close the show: “MoMA’s brightly colored, red-skied “London Bridge” and a much more subdued canvas in dark, buoyant blues and washy pinks, grays, and greens, “View of the Thames” from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In between the Whistler and the Derains are Whistler’s dark, deep blue “Nocturne” (c. 1870); a mildly interesting Pissarro, “Charing Cross Bridge, London” (1890); a beautiful though strangely out-of-place grouping of Japanese woodblock prints; gorgeous photographs (including a panoramic view of the Tower of London and Tower Bridge and a group of stereographs) by Alvin Langdon Coburn and William Strudwick; prints by James Tissot, Joseph Pennell, Clifford Addams, and Gustave Dore; and paintings and watercolors by Tissot, Pennell, Childe Hassam, and John Atkinson Grimshaw.

“Monet’s London” can be tedious and drab in places, as if you were rummaging through your grandmother’s attic or poring over images and information for a history exam. But it is worth wading through from beginning to end. The many photographs in the show could be a problem, in that they constantly offer a reality check against which the paintings are in danger of being judged. But the greatest works in the show, the Derains and the Monets, stand their ground so independently, so vibrantly, that a firm line is drawn between art and mediocrity or documentation.

May 27 to September 4 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).