Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect

Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect from 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the most unusual working method of Monet's career — the London series canvases were the first he completed entirely in the studio long after the observations from which they derived. He made his three London visits (1899, 1900, 1901) from the fifth-floor windows of the Savoy Hotel, where the westward view across the Thames encompassed Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and — in the far distance — the Houses of Parliament. He worked on multiple canvases simultaneously, moving between them as light conditions changed, and then transported the unfinished works back to Giverny, completing them over the following two years in the studio. This studio completion process, which Monet acknowledged only reluctantly when pressed, was the culmination of a trend visible in the Rouen Cathedral series: his increasing willingness to trust color relationships established in memory and reflection over the direct plein-air response to optical reality. The sunlight variant is among the warmest and most chromatic of the Waterloo series, the coal-smoke atmosphere tinted gold and orange by the filtered sunlight.

The bridge's grey stone form dissolves in the London atmosphere, emerging as a suggestion of arches through the haze. The river surface reflects the warm ochre and pink of sunlight filtered through coal-smoke fog. Monet's brushwork here is looser and more diffuse than his Giverny garden work, appropriate to subjects that barely maintain physical solidity.