Charing Cross Bridge, London (Marmottan study)

Charing Cross Bridge in the Musée Marmottan Monet is a working study Claude Monet made in London, probably during one of his stays of 1899–1901, and never took further. Instead of the colored fog of his finished Thames pictures, it shows the bridge, a passing train and the far skyline drawn in rapid strokes of dark blue and violet across a bare, cream-colored canvas. It stayed in Monet's studio at Giverny and came to the Marmottan with the bequest of his son Michel Monet in 1966 (inv. 5101).

What you are looking at

The canvas is wide, about 60 by 100 cm, and nearly two thirds of it is untouched or thinly washed with a pale cream ground. Across the middle, a band of dark ink-blue and purple strokes forms the bridge and the buildings behind it. At left, a blocky mass of dark shapes and a small dome mark the Charing Cross end of the bridge and the station buildings. In the center, a rounded dark cloud sits on the deck, the smoke or bulk of a train. On the right, behind the bridge, a low line of trees and buildings ends in a small pale dome or tower.

The bridge's piers are a row of dark vertical rectangles, and between them Monet scrubbed in patches of warm pink and gray. On the water below, a few long horizontal strokes of dark blue and green mark reflections or the wake of a boat, and a faint ghostly loop in the lower center may be a boat sketched and then abandoned. The upper half is a smooth, pale, slightly yellowed field: either the fog itself, or simply ground waiting for paint.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted the Thames from the Savoy Hotel in autumn 1899 and in the late winter and spring of 1900 and 1901. Looking upriver, he saw the Hungerford railway bridge, called Charing Cross Bridge after its terminus; looking downriver he saw Waterloo Bridge. He kept dozens of canvases going at once and later finished many in his Giverny studio for the 1904 exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery. Our Monet in London hub follows the project.

This study's dark, drawn character, with the structure stated plainly, suggests a day of relatively clear visibility, unusual for the series.

How it was painted

The paint is thin and fluid, applied with a loaded brush in quick horizontal and vertical marks, almost like ink drawing. Monet established the architecture first, with dark tones, before beginning the atmospheric layers that would normally cover it. Here those layers never came. The result shows how firm the underlying design of the London pictures was: the bridge sits at the same height and the same angle as in the finished canvases, and the spacing of the piers matches.

How this version differs

Set it beside a finished canvas such as Charing Cross Bridge, London in Chicago, where the bridge is a pale shape barely distinguishable from the mist, and the contrast is startling: the Marmottan study is dark on light, the finished picture light on light. It belongs with the sketch-like Indianapolis canvas as evidence of Monet's process. The same museum also owns the brilliantly colored Charing Cross Bridge, Smoke in the Fog, so visitors can see both ends of the process in one place. All versions are on our Charing Cross Bridge series page.

The studio inheritance

When Monet died in 1926, hundreds of canvases remained at Giverny: late water lilies, garden pictures, and unfinished works from earlier campaigns like this one. His son Michel kept them largely out of sight and, on his death in 1966, left them to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which placed them in the Musée Marmottan. That bequest is why the Marmottan holds the world's largest Monet collection, and why it is rich in exactly this kind of private, unfinished work.

Where to see it

The study is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris's 16th arrondissement; see our Marmottan guide for the collection and visiting tips. Not every work is on permanent display. Note that catalogue numbers for this canvas vary between sources: Wikidata gives Wildenstein 1553, while the Commons image file is labeled W 1554.