Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather

Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather is a variant of the Waterloo Bridge series in which fog and overcast have replaced sunlight to give the same subject a fundamentally different character. Monet worked the London bridges systematically through different atmospheric conditions as he had worked the Grainstacks and Rouen Cathedral: the same motif under different light becomes almost unrecognisable, demonstrating his argument that light and atmosphere, not the fixed object, constitute visual reality. The grey weather variants are the most severe and dissolved of the series, the bridge barely present through the murk.

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.