Charing Cross Bridge

Historical information

During the years between 1899 and 1905, Monet travelled to London to capture its sights from the fifth-floor balcony of the Savoy Hotel. Monet was captivated by the London fog, a notable atmospheric effect made markedly worse by the heavy pollution of the Industrial Revolution. He painted the Houses of Parliament, Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge over and over, as he had earlier done with haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, dashing off paintings to capture fleeting atmospheric effects. He was extremely prolific, beginning nearly 100 paintings in London. Thirty-seven of the canvases were of Charing Cross Bridge, only twelve of which he finished in London; the rest he took back to his Giverny studio for completion.

Locations

The Charing Cross Bridge paintings are scattered in collections all around the world. The unfinished canvas held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art was once derided by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal as second-rate, proof that "even a master can have his off days". Other versions are at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Museum of Fine Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

One version was stolen from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam on October 16, 2012 and is believed to have been incinerated by the mother of one of the thieves in her oven.

In 2018, the National Gallery in London exhibited two paintings of the series, together in a single room, for the duration of a temporary exhibition titled Monet & Architecture, devoted to Claude Monet's use of architecture as a means to structure and enliven his art. This was a rare occurrence because no museum owns or exhibits more than one in a permanent collection. The two paintings that were exhited were taken from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon and the Baltimore Museum of Art