Japanese Bridge

Japanese Bridge (Le Pont japonais) is a painting by Claude Monet of the arched footbridge in his water garden at Giverny, dated by the Musée Marmottan Monet to between 1918 and 1919. At 74 by 92 centimeters it is one of the smaller canvases of his late return to the bridge. It belongs to the Marmottan in Paris, which received it in 1966 with the bequest of Michel Monet, the painter's son.

What you're looking at

This is the coolest and most nocturnal-looking of the late bridges. The palette is almost entirely blue-green, slate and gray, with whitish lilac for the light. The bridge is a heavy dark arch spanning the canvas from left to right just above the middle, its upper edge picked out with a few strokes of dull red and plum. Above it, the wisteria and the trees beyond are a dense wall of teal and bottle green, broken at the center by a pale, chalky glow, as if light were coming through a gap in the leaves.

Below the arch, a broad horizontal band of pale blue and white crosses the pond: the sky, or the bright foliage, reflected in the water. It is the brightest passage in the picture and it repeats the curve of the bridge upside down, so that arch and reflection form a loose oval. The lower third of the canvas sinks into darker blue and green, with a few horizontal dashes of violet and a line of rust near the bottom edge. On the far left, a column of blue-white strokes, thick and crusty, suggests a lit clump of plants on the bank. The paint everywhere is thick and worked over, with strokes laid wet into wet.

Despite the date, the effect is closer to evening than to noon. The lilies themselves are hard to find; the subject is the arch, its reflection and the dim light around them.

Giverny, 1918–19

Monet painted the bridge in a clear, carefully drawn series in 1899 and 1900, among them Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies at the Metropolitan Museum. Around 1918, nearly eighty and working on the immense water-lily decorations he would give to the French state, he took up the motif again. His sight had been failing since about 1912, when he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes, and in these years he complained that colors had lost their force.

That context matters for this picture. The blues and grays of this canvas, and the soft, fused forms, are the opposite of the hot, red-orange bridges he would paint in the following years, such as the Marmottan's red Le Pont japonais. Scholars have connected the shift toward reds and yellows to the yellowing of his lenses; this blue version shows that he could still see, and paint, cool harmonies in 1918–19.

How it was painted

The canvas is a standard size, worked at the pond's edge or from studies made there. Monet built the picture in layers: thin first washes of blue-green, then thicker scumbles of white and lilac dragged across the surface, so that the darker color shows through. The brush is loaded and the strokes are short and curving in the foliage, long and horizontal in the water. The signature-like marks at the lower right appear in reproductions, but the Marmottan catalogues the work as unsigned; many of the late canvases carry only a studio stamp added after Monet's death.

How this version differs

Among the late bridges, this one is unusual for its smaller size and its cool tonality. Compared with the 1918 panorama in the same museum, which is sunlit yellow-green, it is a dusk picture. Compared with the Van Gogh Museum's Japanese Bridge, which shares its blue-green range, it is darker and more enclosed, with the light gathered into one band across the water. The full sequence is in the Japanese Footbridge series.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, home to the largest group of works by Claude Monet, including dozens of late pictures of the garden at Giverny. Not every canvas is on view at once; see Monet at the Musée Marmottan.