Waterloo Bridge (Kerry Stokes Collection)

This Waterloo Bridge is one of the smaller canvases, 64.7 × 81 cm, of Claude Monet's long series of views of the Thames from the Savoy Hotel in London, dated 1899–1901. It is number 1574 in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné and belongs to the Kerry Stokes Collection in Perth, Western Australia, one of the major private art collections in Australia. It has been lent to exhibitions including Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape at the National Gallery of Australia in 2008.

What you're looking at

At first it looks like an abstract picture in turquoise. The whole canvas is covered with quick, diagonal strokes of blue-green, pale teal and lilac, the fog filling the sky and sitting on the river. Only gradually does the bridge appear: a faint, slightly darker horizontal band across the middle, with no arches clearly drawn.

Two warm elements cut through the cool. In the upper left, a small orange-gold sun, a single round dab, sits inside a patch of violet and magenta, the color of light bleeding through fog. Below, on the river, short strokes of pink and coral lie in horizontal rows, the sun's reflection broken up by the current.

This version is distinct for its extreme reduction. There are no chimneys, no boats and almost no bridge. The sun in fog, and its echo on the water, is the whole subject. The handling is sketch-like and fast, the strokes sweeping in different directions as if recording the fog's movement.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted in London in the autumn of 1899 and the winters of 1900 and 1901, working on dozens of canvases at once from his room at the Savoy. When the light changed, often within minutes, he switched canvases. Many of the smaller 65 × 81 cm pictures like this one seem to preserve such brief moments with less studio reworking than the larger canvases he dated 1902–04.

The smaller format, roughly the size of a standard French "no. 25" canvas, may also have been easier to handle when Monet needed to switch pictures quickly. Larger canvases of 65 × 100 cm make up most of the series, and many of them carry dates of 1902–04 that reflect long reworking at Giverny. The small ones keep more of the London moment.

How it was painted

The paint is thin in places and heavier in others. The fog is a web of crossing strokes laid wet into wet, with lilac pulled into the teal. The sun is a single thick touch of orange, ringed with violet. The pink reflections are dabbed on last, on top of the green, in short parallel strokes.

How this version differs

It has a near-twin in the Davis Museum's Waterloo Bridge, the same size and with a red sun at upper left over turquoise fog. Both belong with the Matsushita Waterloo Bridge in the small-format group of the Waterloo Bridge series. Compare the National Gallery of Canada's larger Waterloo Bridge: the Sun in a Fog, where the sun sits high at center and its reflection makes an orange path.

The bridge itself

Waterloo Bridge, by John Rennie, opened in 1817 and named for the victory of two years before. It was a granite bridge of nine elliptical arches, long considered one of the most elegant in London. It was demolished in the 1930s and replaced by the present bridge, which opened in 1945. In canvases like this one, though, the bridge's architecture hardly matters: Monet reduces it to a faint band in the fog. That reduction is the point. Where earlier views of London, by painters such as Canaletto, documented the bridges in detail, Monet treated them as screens on which weather and light could play.

Where to see it

As a private collection, the Kerry Stokes Collection is not permanently on public display, but it lends regularly to Australian museums. For Claude Monet's London paintings on view, see Monet in London and where to see Monet's paintings.