Charing Cross Bridge (Cardiff)

Charing Cross Bridge in Cardiff is a canvas Claude Monet began in London around 1900 and signed and dated Claude Monet 1902 after finishing it at Giverny. It shows the railway bridge across the Thames in a soft peach and turquoise haze, with the towers of Westminster rising at upper right and two small boats on the river below. It belongs to Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales (NMW A 2483), one of eight Monets left to Wales by the collector Margaret Davies in 1963.

What you are looking at

The canvas is close to square in feeling, about 65 by 81 cm, and the composition is calm and balanced. The bridge, a pale blue-green bar, crosses the picture just below the middle. At left, where the railway runs into Charing Cross station, a dark blue-violet cloud of smoke rises from a train, with a hint of a darker structure behind it. At upper right the Victoria Tower and the clock tower stand as tall gray-blue shapes against a sky that warms from turquoise at the edges to peach and coral near the sun.

The sun itself is not shown, but its presence is felt in a soft orange glow at far right and in the long, warm reflections that streak across the river. On the water, two boats are picked out: one with a standing figure, in a pale patch of light just below the central span, and another, smaller, in the lower foreground. In the bottom right corner a dark turquoise mass suggests the Embankment trees. The signature and date sit just above them.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted the view upriver from his window at the Savoy Hotel during his London stays of 1899, 1900 and 1901. He worked on canvases of Charing Cross Bridge in the mornings and the Houses of Parliament in the late afternoon, alternating as the light changed. Back at Giverny he spent three more years reworking them, which is why many, like this one, carry dates of 1902 or 1903. See our Monet in London hub for the chronology.

How it was painted

The surface is dense, built up in many layers of fine, interlaced strokes. The sky mixes peach, coral, lemon and turquoise in short diagonal touches, and the river picks up the same colors in horizontal flecks, so that sky and water mirror one another. Monet kept the values high and close, letting the darker accents (the smoke, the boats, the trees) do the work of structure. The reworking at Giverny shows in the smoothness of the color transitions; there is less raw, broken handling than in the sketches.

The Davies sisters

Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, granddaughters of the Welsh industrialist David Davies, were among the earliest and most important British collectors of Impressionism. Margaret bought this canvas in 1913, when Monet was still little collected in Britain. The sisters' bequests, of 1951 and 1963, transformed the national collection in Cardiff; Margaret's included eight works by Monet, among them this painting and three of his water lily pictures.

How this version differs

Compared with the cool Thyssen-Bornemisza canvas or the misty Overcast Day in Boston, the Cardiff picture is warmer and more finished, with peach and turquoise in balance. Its smoke is darker than the white puffs in most versions. It is closest in color to the Chicago canvas of 1901, which the dealer Durand-Ruel recorded as a sunset. The whole run is in our Charing Cross Bridge series page.

From Savoy window to Giverny studio

The double date of this canvas, begun around 1900 and signed 1902, is typical of the series. Monet found it impossible to finish the London pictures on the spot because the effects changed too quickly, and once home he decided to complete them from memory and by comparison with one another. He told his dealer Durand-Ruel that he needed to see them all together to finish any one of them. Critics later questioned this studio work, but it is what gives canvases like the Cardiff picture their unified, glowing color.

Where to see it

The painting is in the collection of National Museum Cardiff, which shows the Davies sisters' Impressionist pictures in its art galleries. The museum's record has listed the work as on loan at times, so check before visiting. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.