Charing Cross Bridge

Charing Cross Bridge in the Murauchi Art Museum is a canvas Claude Monet painted around 1899 from his window at the Savoy Hotel in London. It is one of the greenest pictures of the motif: a yellow-green mist fills the sky and river, the bridge is a faint blue line, and the Houses of Parliament rise at right in a pale blue cloud. The canvas is signed at lower right and dated, by Wikidata and the museum, to about 1899. It belongs to the Murauchi Art Museum in Hachiōji, western Tokyo.

What you are looking at

This is a wide canvas, about 65 by 92 cm, and Monet uses the extra width to stretch the bridge right across the picture. It sits higher than in some versions, roughly a third of the way down from the middle, and is made of a thin blue horizontal with three sets of piers below, each echoed by a soft blue reflection.

The color is unusual. The upper sky is a warm ocher-green, cooling to a pale yellow-green near the horizon. On the right, around the towers of Westminster, Monet painted a distinct patch of cool blue, as if a bank of fog had settled around Parliament while the rest of the river stayed in sun. The towers themselves, the Victoria Tower and the clock tower, are light blue shapes inside that cloud. Left of center, above the bridge, a small burst of white and pale pink marks the steam of a train. The river is a fine weave of green, yellow and lilac strokes, and at lower right a darker green mass suggests the trees of the Embankment.

Where and when it was painted

Monet came to London in autumn 1899 and lodged at the Savoy, on the north bank of the Thames between Charing Cross and Waterloo. From the upper floors he could see upstream across the railway bridge to Westminster, and downstream to Waterloo Bridge. He returned in the winter and spring of 1900 and 1901, painting dozens of canvases at once, and finished many at Giverny before showing 37 Thames views at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1904. Our Monet in London hub follows the whole project.

How it was painted

The surface is worked in fine, directional strokes, mostly diagonal in the sky and horizontal on the water, built up over a light ground. Monet avoids any strong dark: even the trees at lower right are mid-toned. The bridge is rendered with a few dragged lines, and the towers are reserved in a slightly cooler color rather than drawn. This is the "colored atmosphere" approach of his series painting, where the motif matters less than the tinted air between painter and subject.

The green cast is worth noticing. London's coal-smoke fogs could take on yellow, brown or green tints, and contemporaries described them in exactly these terms. Monet's choice here may record such a fog, or may be a harmony he developed when reworking the canvas.

How this version differs

Compare it with the cool Thyssen-Bornemisza version or the rosy Menard Art Museum canvas, both from 1899, and the Murauchi picture stands apart for its green-gold tonality and the cloud of blue that isolates Parliament. Its wider format matches the Shelburne Museum version, which shows the same view in brighter sun. See every canvas in our Charing Cross Bridge series page.

Collecting Monet in Japan

Japanese collectors were among Monet's most devoted admirers from the 1910s onward, and several visited him at Giverny, where the artist's love of Japanese prints and his Japanese footbridge made a natural bond. As a result, Japan today holds an unusually large number of his paintings, including several Charing Cross Bridge canvases. Alongside this Murauchi picture, versions are in the Menard Art Museum near Nagoya and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which makes it possible to compare different moods of the same motif within a single country.

Where to see it

The Murauchi Art Museum in Hachiōji, Tokyo, is a private museum built around a collection of nineteenth-century French painting, with works by Monet, Corot and the Barbizon painters. Opening times and display can change, so check before visiting. For other Monet holdings worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings.