Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather

Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather from 1900 at the Art Institute of Chicago approaches the limit of Monet's dissolution of architectural form — the bridge barely present through a murk of fog and coal smoke so dense that the composition is organized almost entirely around tonal distinctions within a near-monochromatic gray field. Gray weather conditions were the atmospheric extreme that Monet found most philosophically compelling in London: they eliminated color almost entirely, reducing the world to value relationships, and they were also the most characteristically 'London' conditions — the grey Thames weather that had impressed Turner, Whistler, and generations of painters before Monet. His own earlier London visits in 1870–71 (as a wartime refugee) had given him his first sustained experience of London light, and his return in 1899–1901 with the specific artistic purpose of painting the Thames was informed by thirty years of accumulated memory and anticipation. The gray weather variants of the Waterloo series are the series' most severe and abstractly minimal works, and they have attracted the most interest from scholars connecting Monet's late work to the development of modernist abstraction.

In grey weather conditions Monet works in an extremely restricted tonal range — blue-grey, mauve-grey, warm grey — with the bridge form nearly dematerialised. The compositional structure is provided by the suggestion of arches through the haze rather than described stonework. The paint application is thin and loose, appropriate to the atmospheric dissolution of the subject.