The Japanese Bridge

The Japanese Bridge (Le Pont japonais) is a late painting by Claude Monet of the footbridge over the water-lily pond at Giverny, made between about 1918 and 1924 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1924. It measures 89 by 100 centimeters and is unsigned. Like most of Monet's late garden pictures, it stayed in his studio, passed to his son Michel, and came to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris with Michel's bequest in 1966.

What you're looking at

This is one of the darkest of the late bridges. The palette is russet, rust, plum, olive and deep violet, with a sudden blaze of orange and yellow in the upper left corner, as if the sun were breaking through the leaves there. The bridge is a heavy, low arch crossing the canvas a little above the center, painted in dark violet-brown with a rim of green-gray along its top. Above it, the wisteria and trees form a thick screen of brown-red and dark green strokes, with small sparks of yellow and orange scattered through them like late light on autumn leaves.

On the right, a column of blue and violet vertical strokes rises from bottom to top: the willow and the tall irises at the edge of the pond, in shadow. Below the arch the pond is barely distinguished from the bank. A few horizontal strokes of green, gray-blue and lilac suggest water and lily pads, and at the lower left a curl of blue-green may be a clump of leaves on the bank. At the bottom right a small flash of orange and yellow echoes the light in the opposite corner.

The overall impression is of evening, or of autumn, with the bridge almost swallowed by shadow.

The late bridges and Monet's eyesight

Monet painted the bridge first in 1899–1900, in clear greens and with the structure sharply drawn, as in Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies at the Met. When he came back to it around 1918 he was suffering from cataracts, diagnosed in 1912, which progressively dimmed and yellowed his sight until his operation in 1923. He told visitors that colors no longer had the same intensity for him and that he had to rely on the order of the paints on his palette. The heavy, warm tonality of canvases like this one is often linked to that condition, though Monet was also deliberately pushing color and gesture further than ever before.

How it was painted

The handling is vigorous. Strokes of different colors are laid over each other wet, producing the browns and mauves where red and green mix on the canvas. The foliage above the bridge is built from short, nervous strokes, the willow at right from long verticals, the water from horizontals. The canvas's near-square format, 89 by 100 centimeters, is shared with several other Marmottan bridges of these years.

How this version differs

Among the Marmottan bridges of the same size, Le pont japonais (W 1923) is brighter, with yellows and greens and a readable reflection; the Japanese Bridge W 1928 is a blazing red-orange; Le pont japonais W 1927 is red-brown with green. This one is the most somber, its warm colors pressed down into dusk tones, with the orange flare in the corner as its single point of release. See the whole sequence in the Japanese Footbridge series and the garden in Monet's Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which holds the largest collection of Claude Monet's work, including the core of his late garden paintings. Late garden pictures, the bridges among them, are shown in rotation in the museum's lower-level Monet gallery. See Monet at the Musée Marmottan.