The Japanese Bridge

The Japanese Bridge (Le Pont japonais) is a late painting by Claude Monet of the footbridge over the lily pond in his garden at Giverny, catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1921a and dated between 1919 and 1924. It is listed in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (inventory s284B/2010), which has shown it in its galleries devoted to Van Gogh and his contemporaries.

What you're looking at

The canvas is horizontal and almost monochrome: a soft, smoky range of sage, gray-green, blue-green and slate, with whitish highlights and a few accents of dark red. The bridge is a wide arch that spans nearly the whole width just above the middle. Its upper edge is a line of dark green, and along it run small dashes of crimson and brick red, the most noticeable color in the picture. Monet's bridge was painted green, so the red here is not a literal record; it reads as light catching the rail or as an accent that holds the eye on the curve.

Above the arch, the wisteria and trees are a cloud of short, crusty strokes in gray-green and white. In the center, just above the bridge, a paler patch of light glows through the foliage. Below, the pond is a broad oval of pale green-white, almost luminous, brushed with horizontal strokes. Around this bright center the water darkens to blue and slate toward the edges. A couple of dark flecks at upper right may be flowers or shadows. The signature appears faintly at the lower right.

The effect is hushed, like the garden on an overcast day or at dusk. The bridge and its reflection form a loose ring of darker color enclosing the brightest passage in the picture.

The late bridge pictures

In 1899 Monet painted his footbridge a dozen times from the same place, in clear greens, as in The Japanese Footbridge in Washington. Around 1918 he returned to it, now as a man in his late seventies with cataracts, and over the next six years produced about two dozen bridge canvases in an altogether freer style. Most stayed in his studio until his death in 1926 and passed to his son Michel. Some were later sold; others came to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris with Michel's bequest in 1966.

How it was painted

The surface is worked with a dry, loaded brush, the paint dragged and scumbled so that each stroke breaks over the texture of the layer beneath. That gives the foliage a granular, crumbly look. On the pond, longer, flatter strokes lie side by side. Color differences are small; Monet builds the picture through value, keeping the darkest tones for the arch and the corners and the lightest for the center of the water.

How this version differs

This canvas belongs to the cool, gray-blue end of the late bridges, near the Marmottan's Japanese Bridge of 1918–19 and the turquoise version lent to the National Gallery, London. It is more muted than either, closer to gray, with the red flecks on the rail as its signature detail. Against the hot red Le Pont japonais at the Marmottan, it shows how wide the range of the late series was. Follow the full sequence in the Japanese Footbridge series and the garden in Monet's Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting is listed in the Van Gogh Museum's collection and has hung there in the third-floor rooms on Van Gogh and his contemporaries, where it shows where Impressionism went in the decades after Van Gogh's death. The museum's catalogue details for this work, including its dimensions and how it came to Amsterdam, are not widely published. For other Monet collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.