Charing Cross Bridge

Charing Cross Bridge in the Menard Art Museum is one of the canvases Claude Monet began in London in the autumn of 1899, and it is the pinkest of that first group. The railway bridge stretches across the Thames in a powdery rose haze, two puffs of smoke glow coral above it, and the towers of Westminster stand at upper right like gray-violet shadows. Signed and dated Claude Monet 99, it is now in the Menard Art Museum in Komaki, Aichi Prefecture, Japan.

What you are looking at

Almost the entire surface is pink: a warm, chalky rose in the sky, a cooler lilac in the water. Monet allows only a few accents to break it. Across the sky at left are reddish diagonal streaks, as if the sun were just behind the fog and catching it from within. Two clouds of smoke, one near the center and one at far right, are painted in white, coral and pale green, marking trains on the bridge or tugs on the water.

The bridge is a pale blue-gray band set just below the middle, its paired piers dropping in soft verticals. The water beneath is a field of glittering white flecks over lilac, densest in a broad path below the center of the bridge where the hidden sun strikes it. A single small boat with a standing rower sits in that path, and in the bottom right corner the dark green-blue mass of the Embankment trees closes the composition. The signature is in the lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet stayed at the Savoy Hotel for around six weeks in September and October 1899. From his upper-floor room he looked west, upriver, across the Hungerford railway bridge to the Houses of Parliament, and east toward Waterloo Bridge. These two views, along with Parliament itself painted the following year from St Thomas' Hospital, became the backbone of the London series described in our Monet in London hub.

London's fogs, thickened by coal smoke, were what drew him back. He wrote to his wife Alice almost daily about the light, complaining when it was too clear and rejoicing when the mist turned colored. This canvas records one of the colored mornings.

How it was painted

The picture is built in thin, overlapping layers. Monet seems to have laid in the overall rose tone first, then worked the river with crisp white touches that sit on top of the pink like reflections on a dull surface. The sky is handled more loosely, with long diagonal strokes that give it movement. Contours are almost absent: the Parliament towers are formed by slightly darker strokes of the same violet, and the bridge is barely more solid than the air.

The effect depends on keeping values very close together. Seen from a distance, the picture reads as a single tinted atmosphere, the enveloppe Monet described as "the same light spread over everything", with the glitter on the water as its one point of intensity.

How this version differs

Among the 1899 canvases of the motif, each has its own key. The Santa Barbara picture is yellow and violet, the Thyssen-Bornemisza version cool blue-gray, and the Murauchi Art Museum canvas a hazy green. The Menard picture is the rose one, and its red-streaked sky makes it among the warmest of the early group. Browse all of them in our Charing Cross Bridge series page.

Monet's London mornings

Monet's routine in London was strict. He painted the bridges from the Savoy in the morning, when the sun rose behind him downstream and lit the view upriver from the side, and moved on to other motifs as the day advanced. A rose-tinted canvas like this one fits the early hours, when mist off the river had not yet burned away and low sun colored it from within. He wrote that he could sometimes see the effect for only a few minutes before the fog shifted, and he would set aside a canvas until the same conditions returned, sometimes days later.

Where to see it

The Menard Art Museum, founded in 1987 by the cosmetics company Nippon Menard, is in Komaki, north of Nagoya. Its collection of Western and Japanese art includes several Impressionist paintings, and this Monet is among its best-known works. Display changes with the museum's exhibition program, so check before visiting. For other Monet collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.