Waterloo Bridge in London

Waterloo Bridge in London is one of Claude Monet's views of the Thames from the Savoy Hotel, signed and dated 1902 at lower left. It measures 65.7 × 100.5 cm and is number 1594 in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné. It belongs to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (P.1959-0155) as part of the Matsukata Collection, the group of Western art formed by the shipbuilding magnate Kōjirō Matsukata, much of which returned to Japan from France in 1959.

What you're looking at

This is one of the softest and most luminous of the Waterloo Bridge pictures. Everything is pale pink, lilac and cream. The bridge spans the canvas in a long line of arches, each outlined in faint white and lilac, as if it were made of light. Along the top runs a row of small touches in yellow, rust and green, the morning traffic glimpsed through haze.

The far bank and its chimneys are gone: the sky above the bridge is an even, rosy mist. On the left, a few dark touches under an arch suggest a boat, and at the lower center sits a sailing barge with a tan sail and a dark hull, the only firm shape in the picture. A second small sail shows on the right beyond the bridge.

What distinguishes this version is its warmth. The fog is not grey, green or blue but rose, and the effect is of sun shining fully through a thin veil. It is the gentlest of the sunlit versions.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted Waterloo Bridge from the Savoy in the mornings during his visits of 1899, 1900 and 1901, and then continued work on the canvases in his Giverny studio. The date 1902 marks when he judged this one finished, two years before he exhibited thirty-seven Thames views at Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1904.

How it was painted

The surface is a fine, dense web of small strokes in close tones, with pink, lilac, cream and pale yellow interwoven. Edges are dissolved. The barge is painted with a few firmer strokes, which makes it pop against the uniform haze. The evenness of the surface reflects long studio work.

How this version differs

Its closest relative in the Waterloo Bridge series is the Bührle Foundation's Waterloo Bridge, London, Sun Effect, with the same pale arches and single barge, but in a cooler, greener key. The Paul Allen Waterloo Bridge, Hazy Sun of 1903 brings back the chimneys behind a similar pink-gold bridge. The Kunsthaus Zürich's Le Pont de Waterloo, dated the same year, is its opposite: dark, green-grey and lit only by a sun reflection.

A detail to look for

Look at the upper edge of the bridge: a long row of small touches in yellow, rust, green and pink runs from one end to the other. These are the carts, omnibuses and pedestrians crossing the bridge, reduced to dabs of color but still clearly read as moving traffic. They give scale to the bridge and life to an otherwise still scene. Monet often used this device in the series, but in Tokyo's canvas the touches are especially varied and bright against the pale bridge. They also echo the touches of color on the barge below, linking bridge and river in a single scheme.

Where to see it

The National Museum of Western Art, in Ueno Park in a building designed by Le Corbusier, holds one of the largest Monet collections in Asia, including water lilies and views of the Normandy coast. For Claude Monet's London paintings, see Monet in London; for other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.

Kōjirō Matsukata assembled his collection in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, buying directly from Monet at Giverny among others. Part of it, left in France, was seized by the French state after the Second World War, and its return to Japan in 1959 led to the founding of the National Museum of Western Art that year.