Charing Cross Bridge (Chartwell)

Charing Cross Bridge at Chartwell, also catalogued as Pont de Londres, is the London painting Claude Monet signed and dated 1902 after beginning it at the Savoy Hotel on a visit in 1899 or 1900. It is the most golden canvas of the series: the bridge crosses a river of saturated yellow and ocher, smoke billows pink and white above it, and Parliament rises faintly at right. It is also famous for its owner. Emery Reves, Winston Churchill's literary agent, gave it to him in 1949, and it still hangs in the drawing room at Chartwell, the Churchill family home in Kent, now a National Trust property.

What you are looking at

The painting is wide and low, about 64 by 90 cm, and almost every part of it is yellow. The sky is a dense, scrubbed field of lemon, ocher and mustard, with a paler patch near the center. Across it, just below the middle, runs the bridge, a cool gray-blue band whose piers drop into long reflections. Above the left-center span a cloud of pink, lilac and white smoke curls upward, the trace of a train. At upper right, the towers of Westminster are barely suggested by darker vertical strokes of olive and gray within the yellow.

The water mirrors the sky, with broad horizontal strokes of yellow broken by blue and lilac. There are no boats. The signature and date, Claude Monet 1902, are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted the Thames from the Savoy during visits in 1899, 1900 and 1901. Looking upstream he saw the Hungerford railway bridge, always called Charing Cross Bridge after its terminus; downstream he saw Waterloo Bridge. He brought the canvases back to Giverny and reworked them for years, which is why this one is dated 1902. Our Monet in London hub tells the full story.

How it was painted

The surface is thick and heavily worked, with layers of yellow scrubbed and dragged over one another in every direction. It is one of the most insistently colored pictures in the series: rather than tinting a gray fog, Monet turned the entire atmosphere into a single hot color, the yellow-brown of a London "pea-souper" lit by the sun. The bridge, kept cool and gray, is the one element that resists.

For decades the picture hung in a room where Churchill smoked cigars. Before it was lent to the Courtauld Gallery's Monet and London: Views of the Thames exhibition in 2024, the first time it had left Chartwell since Churchill hung it there, the National Trust had it cleaned, removing a layer of grime and revealing brighter color.

Churchill and Monet

Churchill was a dedicated amateur painter, and Monet was one of the artists he most admired; he painted his own views of the Thames and of French landscapes in a loosely Impressionist manner. Reves, a Hungarian-born publisher who handled Churchill's foreign rights, tracked the canvas down in Paris and gave it to him in 1949, the year of his 75th birthday. After Churchill's death the painting passed to the nation, accepted in lieu of tax in 1967 according to the Courtauld, and was transferred to the National Trust in 1984. Wikidata also records an earlier owner, the collector Henri-Edmond Canonne, from 1926 to 1942.

How this version differs

Most Charing Cross canvases are pale and veiled; this one is saturated. Compare the yellow-violet Santa Barbara version of 1899, which is lighter and sparkling, or Charing Cross Bridge, Fog in Toronto, where the yellow is cooler and greener. Only Smoke in the Fog in the Marmottan matches its intensity, in red and violet instead. See the full series in our Charing Cross Bridge series page.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the drawing room at Chartwell, near Westerham in Kent (National Trust inv. 1102455), where visitors see it from behind a rope as part of the house tour. Chartwell's opening is seasonal. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.