Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect with Smoke

Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect with Smoke (Le pont de Waterloo, effet de soleil avec fumées) is one of Claude Monet's London views from the Savoy Hotel, signed and dated 1903 at lower left. It measures about 65 × 100 cm and is number 1566 in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné. It came to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1976 as part of the Helen and Abram Eisenberg Collection (1976.38), and it is shown in the museum's Cone Wing. Some records date it to 1900, the year Monet probably began it.

What you're looking at

The picture is organized in three bands. At the top, a hazy sky of lilac, blue-grey and pale orange is crossed by the faint shapes of chimneys and a large dark building on the south bank, with streaks of smoke drifting through. Across the middle runs the bridge, a dark blue-violet silhouette with a few small arches just visible.

Below it, the Thames is where the event happens. A broad horizontal band of sunlight, yellow and orange, lies across the river just beneath the bridge, as if the low sun were reflected there. Rising out of it, and partly blocking it, are a row of white and pink puffs: plumes of steam or smoke from tugs and steamboats passing under the bridge. They catch the light and glow against the dark water.

That is what distinguishes this version: the smoke is not distant, on the far bank, but right in the foreground, on the river, and it becomes the brightest shape in the picture. The effect is of a busy working river at early morning, smoky and luminous at once.

Where and when it was painted

In 1899, 1900 and 1901, Monet painted Waterloo Bridge from the Savoy each morning. Steam traffic on the Thames, tugs towing barges, was constant, and its smoke mingled with the fog that he loved. He finished and dated many canvases at Giverny in 1903, ahead of the 1904 exhibition of his Thames views at Durand-Ruel in Paris.

Thames tugs of the period burned coal and trailed heavy plumes, and the lighters and barges they towed passed constantly under the bridges. Monet's letters from London often mention the river traffic alongside the fog. In this canvas the two merge: the steam plumes take on the same lilac and gold as the sky, and it becomes hard to tell where weather ends and industry begins.

How it was painted

The smoke plumes are laid in thick, rounded strokes of white tinted with pink and lilac, painted over the river's darker blue. The gold band is a series of short, horizontal dabs. The bridge and sky are thinner and flatter. The picture depends on the contrast between the soft, warm smoke and the cool, dark river.

How this version differs

Its closest relative in the Waterloo Bridge series is the Denver Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, also dated 1903, where similar white plumes rise from a yellow river. The Baltimore canvas is darker and bluer, with the smoke more prominent against the shadow of the bridge. The Santa Barbara Waterloo Bridge shows the same morning light glittering on the water without the steam.

A detail to look for

In the upper sky, a long, dark diagonal trail of smoke drifts from one of the chimneys toward the right, almost parallel to the bridge below. Monet uses it to echo the horizontal of the bridge and to frame the bright band of the river from above. Compare the white plumes on the water, which rise vertically. Between the dark smoke above and the bright steam below, the painting holds two kinds of man-made atmosphere, both transformed by the same sunlight. This is the effect the Santa Barbara Museum's label describes for the series: natural and man-made atmospheres mingling, and Monet painting them as one.

Where to see it

The Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing is known for the Cone sisters' collection of Matisse and modern French art, and the Eisenberg Monet hangs there among it. For Claude Monet's other London subjects, see Monet in London; for other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.