Le pont de Waterloo

Le pont de Waterloo is a Claude Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge over the Thames in London, one of the forty-odd canvases in his series of the bridge. The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, which received it as a gift from Ione T. Staley, dates it 1903; it is no. 1584 in the Wildenstein catalogue. It is one of the most unusual versions, closer to the river and full of boats.

What you're looking at

In most of the Waterloo Bridge pictures the bridge sits in the middle of a wide canvas with the smoking south bank behind it. Here Monet pushes the bridge up to the top of the picture and lets the Thames take over. The arches are a pale blue-gray band near the upper edge, with only a strip of trees and roofs above them, and the light comes through the arches from behind, so their openings glow a soft greenish white.

Below, the river is almost the whole subject. It is painted in loose, broad strokes of pale green, silver, lilac and cream. Two Thames sailing barges with rust-red sails move across it: one in the middle distance under the bridge, its sail a warm triangle against the cool water, and a larger one in the foreground, low and dark in the hull, with a smaller boat beside it. At the right edge a third sail is just visible. The signature runs along the lower right in dark paint.

The palette is cooler and greener than most of the series, and there is no sun disc or pink sky. The museum describes the scene as backlit by morning sun, the arches dissolving into haze.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted Waterloo Bridge from his room at the Savoy Hotel during stays in London in 1899, 1900 and 1901. The bridge lay downstream, to the east, so in the morning it stood against the light. Working on many canvases at once, he moved between them as the weather and the light changed, and then finished them at Giverny, signing most of them in 1903 or 1904. The Lowe dates this picture 1903; a Sotheby's catalogue of 2006 placed it in 1899–1901, the years he worked on the motif, which is a reminder that these pictures were made over several years. See the Waterloo Bridge series and Monet in London.

How it was painted

The canvas is smaller and squarer than the standard 65 by 100 centimeter format Monet used for most of the series, roughly 64 by 79 centimeters. The paint is thinner and more open, with the weave of the canvas showing through in places, and the barges are drawn with a few quick, wet strokes. That sketchier handling, and the boats themselves, give the picture more of the immediacy of the London sessions and less of the dense, reworked surface typical of the Giverny-finished canvases.

How this version differs

The difference is the viewpoint. Instead of a frieze of arches with chimneys behind, as in the Worcester Waterloo Bridge or the Bern canvas, Monet tips his gaze down toward the water and the working river traffic. The sailing barges, the workhorses of the Thames, appear in other versions only as small dark shapes; here they are the protagonists. The cool green-silver tonality also separates it from the pink and violet effects of pictures like Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Lowe Art Museum on the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables, Florida, catalogued as object 60.057.000, a gift of Ione T. Staley. It has been lent to other Florida museums, including the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville. For other Monet collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.