Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun

Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun (Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé) is one of Claude Monet's London views of the Thames, begun from his room at the Savoy Hotel between 1899 and 1901 and signed and dated 1903 after he finished it at Giverny. It is catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1590 and has belonged to the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester since 1953.

What you're looking at

The bridge crosses the canvas from edge to edge just below the middle, five arches showing, the farthest right cut by the frame. Its stones are a pale, chalky lilac picked out with cream and yellow along the piers and the parapet, where the light catches them. Under each arch is a pool of deeper blue, the only real darks in the picture.

Above, the south bank is a ghost: a long low mass of buildings, a few factory chimneys, one tall tower with a single touch of yellow near its top, and on the left a cloud of pink smoke curling up into the haze. The sky is a uniform violet-pink, with no visible sun. That is the "veiled sun" of the title: the light is everywhere and nowhere, diffused through London's coal smoke and river mist.

The water is the busiest part of the painting. Monet covers it in short, flat, horizontal strokes of pink, blue and lavender, densely packed, so that the river looks like a woven surface. Tiny sparks of yellow along the parapet stand for the traffic on the bridge. The signature and the date 1903 are in blue at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet spent three working stays in London, in autumn 1899 and in the late winters of 1900 and 1901, each time at the Savoy Hotel on the Victoria Embankment. Looking east from his window, he had Waterloo Bridge in front of him, with the industrial south bank beyond. He worked on many canvases at once, picking up whichever matched the conditions of the moment. Fog, smoke and the low winter sun gave him an endlessly changing subject.

He brought the unfinished pictures home and spent two more years working on them at Giverny, away from the motif, until the series held together. Durand-Ruel showed the London paintings in Paris in 1904. See the Waterloo Bridge series and Monet in London for the wider story.

How it was painted

A non-invasive technical study by conservators from Buffalo State in 2016, made for the gallery's 2018 exhibition, used imaging, spectroscopy and ultraviolet light to look below the surface. One clear finding was that Monet moved the smokestacks: the chimneys we see now are not where he first painted them. It is a small but telling sign that he was arranging the skyline for the sake of the picture rather than recording it exactly, probably while reworking the canvas at Giverny.

The paint is applied in many thin, dryish layers, which give the surface its matte, powdery look. Warm and cool colors sit side by side at almost the same value, so the image seems to vibrate when seen from a distance.

How this version differs

This is one of the palest and most unified of the Waterloo Bridge pictures. Compared with the McMaster Sunlight Effect, which uses almost the same composition and size, the Rochester canvas is pinker and warmer, and the sun never shows itself directly. In Waterloo Bridge: the Sun in a Fog in Ottawa, by contrast, the disc of the sun is visible and throws a bright path on the water, and in Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day in Washington the palette turns cold and gray.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting came to the Memorial Art Gallery in 1953 as a gift from the estate of Emily and James Sibley Watson; Emily Sibley Watson had founded the gallery in 1913 in memory of her son. In 2018–19 the gallery built an exhibition around it, Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process, bringing it together with seven other versions from North American museums and publishing the technical findings with RIT Press. It remains one of the highlights of the collection and the best-known Monet in upstate New York. For other versions, see where to see Monet's paintings.