Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather (Gurlitt Bequest)

Waterloo Bridge, temps gris (Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather) is a Claude Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge in London, signed and dated 1903 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1562. It came to light in 2014 among the works kept by the German collector Cornelius Gurlitt in his house in Salzburg, and it passed with his bequest to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, where it is now shown.

What you're looking at

This is one of the darkest and most somber canvases of the series. The bridge is a heavy blue-gray mass running across the middle of the picture, its arches opening onto pale, almost white water where daylight comes through from beyond. Under the second and third arches small boats with figures are silhouetted against that light, the only human presence apart from the rough, broken line of traffic along the parapet.

Behind the bridge rises the industrial south bank: two tall factory chimneys trailing long plumes of smoke to the left and a tall dark tower between them, all in a smoky blue-violet. The sky above is a dense, scumbled gray with brown and cream in it, the color of London coal smoke on an overcast day. The river below is painted in long horizontal strokes of slate, gray-green and violet, with a few pale lights. The signature and date are at lower right in dark paint.

Where and when it was painted

Monet began the Waterloo Bridge canvases from his room at the Savoy Hotel during three stays in London between 1899 and 1901. Looking east, he saw the bridge with the chimneys of the south bank behind it, and painted it in fog, smoke, sun and dusk, often on many canvases in a single day. He finished the pictures at Giverny and dated most of them 1903 before Paul Durand-Ruel showed the London series in Paris in 1904. See the Waterloo Bridge series and Monet in London.

How it was painted

The paint is thicker and more worked than in the pale, misty versions, with dragged and scumbled layers in the sky that let earlier colors show through. The bright openings under the arches are the strongest contrasts in the picture, and Monet builds the whole composition around them: three or four pale shapes set into a dark band, like windows. The smoke is painted with quick, curling strokes over the wet sky.

How this version differs

Among the forty-odd Waterloo Bridge pictures, the Bern canvas belongs to the group of overcast, gray-weather effects, alongside Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day in Washington and Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather in Chicago. It differs from them in its strong contrast between the dark bridge and the light under its arches, and in the prominence of the smoking chimneys, which are fainter in most versions. Compare it with the Worcester canvas, which has a similar layout but a warmer, pinker sky.

The Gurlitt bequest and provenance

Cornelius Gurlitt was the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of the art dealers who worked for the Nazi regime. The discovery of his collection in Munich in 2012 caused an international sensation; the Monet was found later, in 2014, in his house in Salzburg, and was among the most valuable works there. Gurlitt died in May 2014 and left his collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern, which accepted it with a commitment to research the provenance of every work and return anything identified as looted.

The early history of this canvas runs through Monet's dealer Durand-Ruel and German collecting circles, but its whereabouts from about 1914 until it reached the Gurlitts have not been fully documented. A provenance report was prepared in 2017 for the German Lost Art Foundation, and the painting is registered in the Lost Art database. Readers should treat the ownership history between 1914 and 2014 as unresolved.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Kunstmuseum Bern, which has shown it in its displays of the Gurlitt bequest. It is one of very few works by Monet from the London series in Switzerland, alongside versions in Zürich. For other places to see the series, see where to see Monet's paintings.