Happy Birthday Claude Monet!

On #ClaudeMonet’s #birthday, #CharingCrossBridge

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In 1899, London’s Charing Cross Bridge was not the charismatic and picturesque structure it is today. Instead, it was a banal post-and-lintel artery ferrying trains across the Thames and into Charing Cross Station on the West Bank. However, French impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) was less interested in the design of the bridge itself and instead concentrated on the colorful atmospheric effects the London fog and soot had on it, as he peered down on it from his fifth floor balcony in the Savoy Hotel. Monet loved all things British and began painting views from the Savoy in September of 1899. Methodically, he began with sunrise over the Waterloo Bridge to his left and progressed rightward toward Charing Cross Bridge with the afternoon sun. Later still he spent his sundown with the Parliament Building from a view at St. James’ Hospital a few hundred meters away. Nearly one hundred paintings feature these three views, including at least 41 paintings of Waterloo Bridge, 37 of Charing Cross Bridge and 19 of Parliament. Heavily affected by British atmospheric painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, each canvas depicts what the poet Octave Mirbeau described as, “Smoke and Fog; forms, architectural masses, perspectives, a whole deaf rumbling city in the fog… the Sun prisoner of the mists” (quoted in R. Gordon & A. Forge, p. 187). The present “Charing Cross Bridge”, as shown in the St. Louis Museum of Art (USA), depicts a train silently puffing across the bridge in the pale light of the setting sun. The 1903 painting contrasts a fleeting industrial moment with the gently undulating water and sky bifurcated by the bridge itself. This distinction parallels the unease Europe had with the modern world intruding on nature as technology began to overtake traditional life, transport and landscape.

~By Reed V. Horth, for Robin Rile Fine Art.

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