Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume

Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume (Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Mist) is a Claude Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge in London on a misty morning, signed and dated 1904 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1582. It is in a private collection. On 28 June 2022 it was sold at Christie's in London for £30,059,500, one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting from the London series, after decades in the collection of the family of the watch manufacturer Arde Bulova.

What you're looking at

The bridge crosses the canvas just below the middle as a band of cool blue, darker along the top where the traffic forms a ragged edge, its arches opening onto paler, milky water. Under the second arch a small boat is visible, a dark sliver with a pale reflection. Behind, the south bank has almost disappeared; only two tall chimneys stand out, gray-violet against the haze, one of them with a thin wisp of rust-colored smoke.

The sky and the river are painted as one continuous field of pale lilac, gray, cream and blue. The sun of the title is not a disc but a diffuse yellow glow in the upper left corner, and its reflection is repeated in the lower left as a soft patch of yellow and pink on the water. Everything else is cool. The signature and the date 1904 are at lower right in dark green-blue.

Where and when it was painted

Monet began his Waterloo Bridge pictures from his room at the Savoy Hotel during three London stays between 1899 and 1901. Looking east, toward the morning sun, he saw the bridge in silhouette against the light and the smoke of the south bank's factories. He worked on dozens of canvases simultaneously, then finished them at Giverny, where he dated this one 1904, the year Durand-Ruel exhibited the London series in Paris. See the Waterloo Bridge series and Monet in London.

How it was painted

The paint is applied in small, close strokes of nearly equal value, so that the bridge, the sky and the water are separated mainly by temperature, blue against lilac and cream. Monet places the only warm color, the yellow of the sun, at the very edge of the picture, so that the light seems to enter from outside the frame. The broad blue band of the bridge, with its regular arches, gives a firm structure to what is otherwise an almost formless field of mist.

How this version differs

The off-center sun in the corner is what sets this picture apart. In Waterloo Bridge: the Sun in a Fog in Ottawa and in the Milwaukee Sunlight Effect the sun stands over the river and throws a strong path of light on the water. Here it is held back at the left edge, and the bridge stays cool and blue. Compare also Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog in the Hermitage, where the fog is thicker and violet, and the National Gallery of Art's Waterloo Bridge at Dusk, another late picture dated 1904.

Ownership and where to see it

According to reports of the 2022 sale, the painting's earlier owners included Durand-Ruel, the New York collector Adolph Lewisohn and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College; it was sold at auction in 1939 and later belonged to Arde Bulova, chairman of the Bulova Watch Company, whose heirs sold it in 2022. Sources differ on whether Bulova acquired it in 1939 or in 1951. It sold at Christie's 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale on 28 June 2022 for £30,059,500 and is not on public view. For Monet canvases from the series that can be seen in museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.