Waterloo Bridge (Worcester Art Museum)

Claude Monet's Waterloo Bridge in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, is a view of the London bridge across the Thames on a smoky day, signed and dated 1903 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 1568. Worcester bought it from Monet's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1910, only weeks after the dealer acquired it from the artist, and the museum describes itself as the first in America to purchase a Monet.

What you're looking at

The bridge is a long, low band of gray-violet stone across the middle of the canvas, its arches opening onto a lighter, silvery water beyond. Small dark boats float under the second and third arches and in the right foreground, and the parapet is crowned with a ragged line of color: green, red, orange and white touches for the traffic crossing it.

Behind, the south bank is crowded with industry. A tall square tower stands near the center, flanked by thin factory chimneys, and on the left billows of smoke rise in pink, rose and white, the most vivid passage in the picture. The sky is a pale mix of pink, gray and lavender, warmer at the left where the smoke catches the light. The river in the foreground is a gray-green surface of short horizontal strokes with flecks of pink and white. The signature and date are in red-brown at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet worked on the Waterloo Bridge motif from a room in the Savoy Hotel during three visits to London in 1899, 1900 and 1901. He painted the bridge looking east, toward the morning light and the smoke of the south bank's factories, and kept dozens of canvases going at once. He finished them at Giverny, where he compared and reworked them, and dated most of them 1903. The series was shown by Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1904. See the Waterloo Bridge series and Monet in London.

How it was painted

The Worcester canvas is slightly narrower than the 65 by 100 centimeter format used for many of the series, at about 65 by 93 centimeters. Its surface is heavily worked: the sky and smoke are built up in thick, swirling strokes, the water in rows of short dabs, and the bridge in flatter, more opaque paint. The layering reflects the long process of revision: begun in front of the motif, the picture was finished away from it, at Giverny, over months or years.

How this version differs

Compared with the pale, sun-soaked versions such as the McMaster Sunlight Effect, Worcester's picture is grayer and more solid, with a clearly drawn bridge and visible boats. It is closer to the Bern Gray Weather in layout, but warmer, with the pink smoke giving it a soft glow. In the Carnegie Museum's Waterloo Bridge, London the smoke is more diffused and the light more even.

The 1904 exhibition

Monet held back the London pictures for years, refusing to let Durand-Ruel show them piecemeal. When he finally agreed, the dealer's Paris gallery opened Claude Monet: Vues de la Tamise à Londres in May 1904 with thirty-seven canvases of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, hung as groups so that visitors could compare the same view in different light. The show was a critical and commercial success and fixed the idea of the London series as a single work in many parts. Pictures like this one were made to be seen that way, beside their siblings, as much as on their own.

Ownership and where to see it

The Worcester Art Museum purchased the painting in 1910 (accession 1910.37) directly from Durand-Ruel & Sons, about two months after Monet had sold it to the dealer. It is one of the earliest Monets to enter an American museum by purchase rather than gift. In 2019 it was shown with eight other versions of the bridge in Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process, an exhibition first organized by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, home of Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun. It is normally on view in the museum's European galleries. For other Monet collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.