Waterloo Bridge, London

Waterloo Bridge, London from 1903 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is one of the studio-reworked London series canvases that Monet completed at Giverny after his final London visit in 1901. He transported approximately one hundred canvases back to Giverny, working on them through 1902, 1903, and into 1904 before declaring the series complete for the collective exhibition at Durand-Ruel. The Carnegie Museum of Art, which holds one of America's most important collections of French Impressionist painting outside New York and Boston, acquired this Waterloo Bridge canvas as a centerpiece of its European holdings. Pittsburgh's industrial wealth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created the collector class that drove American acquisition of French Impressionism, and the Carnegie's collection reflects that history. The 1903 completion date of this canvas means that by the time Monet considered it finished, he had been living with the London atmospheric effects in memory and on canvas for two years — a reflection process that gave the studio-completed works their particular harmonic unity.

The bridge is rendered in the characteristic cool blue-gray of the series' overcast variants, its arches reflected in the river below with a softness that implies rather than depicts the architectural forms. Monet's handling is assured and final-looking — the result of his studio reworking process rather than direct observation.