Waterloo Bridge (Matsushita Museum of Art)

This Waterloo Bridge is one of the paintings Claude Monet made of the Thames from his room at the Savoy Hotel in London, begun during his stays of 1899–1901. It is one of the smaller canvases of the series, 65 × 81 cm, it is number 1578 in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné, and it belongs to the Matsushita Museum of Art in Kirishima, Kagoshima Prefecture, in southern Japan. Wikidata dates it to 1899, the year Monet began the London pictures.

What you're looking at

At first glance there is hardly a bridge at all. The upper half of the canvas is a thick, brushy fog in pale olive, gold and grey-lilac, laid in diagonal strokes that seem to move. Across the middle, a long, low band of grey-green marks the deck of the bridge, and beneath it three piers stand out as small rounded shapes, each touched with salmon pink where light catches the stone.

The river fills the lower third. It is a muted sea-green, broken by short horizontal dashes of pink and coral, the reflections of sun or lamps on the water. The color is the same as on the piers, so light seems to pass from the bridge into the river. At lower right is the signature.

What makes this version distinct is how little Monet describes. There are no chimneys on the far bank, no boats, no traffic on the bridge, only the essential rhythm of three piers and their reflections in a uniform haze. Compared with the larger, more worked canvases of 1903, it feels close to a first impression of a weather effect, the kind Monet would start on one canvas and abandon when the light changed.

Where and when it was painted

Monet came to London in the autumn of 1899 and returned in the early months of 1900 and 1901, each time staying at the Savoy Hotel on the Embankment. From his balcony he looked east, downstream, to Waterloo Bridge, the granite bridge designed by John Rennie and opened in 1817, with the industrial south bank beyond. He painted it mainly in the mornings, switching between dozens of canvases as the fog shifted. As he later remarked, it was the fog that made London beautiful to him.

How it was painted

The brushwork is loose and directional. Fog is made of quick diagonals, the bridge of a few horizontal sweeps, the reflections of short, single strokes of pink laid wet on green. Monet usually finished his London canvases later in his studio at Giverny, working on them as a group before the 1904 exhibition at Durand-Ruel in Paris, Vues de la Tamise à Londres. This small picture shows less of that reworking than many.

How this version differs

It belongs to a small group of 65 × 81 cm canvases in the Waterloo Bridge series, alongside the Kerry Stokes Collection's Waterloo Bridge and the Davis Museum's Waterloo Bridge, both of which show a red sun through fog. Here there is no sun disc, only diffused warm light. Set it beside the Art Institute of Chicago's Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, where the chimneys and arches are firmly drawn, and you see the full range of the series.

The bridge itself

Waterloo Bridge, designed by the engineer John Rennie and opened in 1817 on the second anniversary of the battle it commemorated, was a long granite bridge of nine elliptical arches, admired as one of the finest in London. By Monet's time it carried heavy traffic between the Strand and the south bank, and its downstream view, toward the City and the industrial south shore, was one of the busiest prospects on the river. The bridge was later found to be structurally unsound and was demolished in the 1930s; the present Waterloo Bridge, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, opened in 1945. Monet's canvases are thus among the most famous records of a London landmark that no longer exists.

Where to see it

The Matsushita Museum of Art, in a spa district of Kirishima, has a collection of European and Japanese painting. For other London views by Claude Monet, see Monet in London; for museums worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings.