Charing-cross-bridge and Kleopatra's needle

Charing-Cross-Bridge and Cleopatra's Needle documents two of London's most prominent riverside landmarks — the Victorian railway bridge and the ancient Egyptian obelisk erected on the Victoria Embankment in 1878. Monet included Cleopatra's Needle in several of his London Thames views, treating its ancient stone with the same atmospheric dissolution he applied to the modern infrastructure around it. The canvas is now in the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo, which holds the largest collection of French Impressionist paintings in the Middle East — a fitting home given the Egyptian reference in the subject.

Monet renders both ancient obelisk and modern bridge as equally dissolving presences within the atmospheric shimmer. The palette is characteristically muted — grey-lavender and soft blue — with the obelisk silhouetted as a dark vertical against the hazy sky.