Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames

Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames is one of the most atmospheric pictures Claude Monet made of London. Signed and dated 1903, it shows the railway bridge as a faint violet outline pushed to the right of the canvas, the whole river and sky drowned in a turquoise fog, and the sun hanging at upper left as a small red-pink disc ringed by a halo of green, its reflection a column of red flecks on the water. It belongs to the Harvard Art Museums (Fogg Museum, inv. 1979.329), the gift of Mrs. Henry Lyman. It was shown in Monet's 1904 exhibition of Thames views at Durand-Ruel in Paris.

What you are looking at

The canvas is about 74 by 92 cm. Almost all of it is a single cool color, a pale turquoise blue, worked in soft, feathery strokes. Unusually, the composition is not centered on the bridge. The bridge appears only in the right half of the picture, and only as a few horizontal and vertical marks in violet and blue: a deck, three piers and their reflections. At far left, a thin dark vertical may be a lamp standard or a chimney on the Embankment. Westminster has vanished.

The focal point is the sun. Monet painted it as a small, solid disc of pinkish red, surrounded by a ragged ring of dark green strokes, as if the fog were thickest around it. Below, on the water, a vertical path of red, pink and white dashes runs downward toward the viewer, the sun's reflection. In the center foreground a small dark triangular shape, a sailing barge, floats in the fog. The signature and date are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted the Thames from the Savoy Hotel during three visits between 1899 and 1901, spending more than seven months in London in total. From his window he looked upriver to Charing Cross Bridge and downriver to Waterloo Bridge. He worked on the canvases at Giverny until 1904. Years later, the dealer René Gimpel recorded Monet saying that he adored London because it was a mass, a whole, and so simple. Our Monet in London hub follows the project.

How it was painted

The museum describes layers of blue, green and pink laid over a cool ground, and the effect is of looking through several veils at once. Monet applied the fog in loose, overlapping strokes that blur the few structural lines. The sun and its reflection are painted with denser, warmer paint, so they come forward from the surface. The green halo around the sun is an unusual and daring choice: a complementary color that makes the red disc glow more intensely.

Ownership

According to the museum, Monet kept the canvas for many years and sold it to the dealers Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel in December 1920. It went to Durand-Ruel's New York branch in 1923 and was sold to Elizabeth Lyman (Mrs. Henry Lyman) by January 1928. She gave it to Harvard's Fogg Museum in 1979.

How this version differs

The Harvard canvas is the blue, sun-in-fog counterpart to the yellow Charing Cross Bridge, Fog in Toronto and the luminous Lyon version of the same year. Its off-center composition, with the sun at left and the bridge pushed right, has a precedent in Impression, Sunrise, where a small red sun also floats in a blue haze. It is among the most reproduced pictures of the Charing Cross Bridge series, and often stands for the series as a whole.

A sun you can look at

Only in a thick fog can the sun be looked at directly, and that is the experience this painting records. Smoke and mist reduced the sun over the Thames to a small, flat, colored disc, and Monet painted it exactly so: a solid red circle that can be stared at, with its light spilled downward onto the water. It is one of the simplest images in the series and one of the most memorable.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Harvard Art Museums on Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which combine the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M. Sackler collections. Check the online collection for current gallery display. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.