Claude Monet
French, 1840-1926

Charing Cross Bridge, 1899
oil on canvas
25 1/8 x 31 3/8 in.

SBMA, Bequest of Katharine Dexter McCormick in memory of her husband, Stanley R. McCormick
1968.20.4



Claude Monet, Self-Portrait, 1886

'"For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value." - Claude Monet

RESEARCH PAPER

Two works of art by Claude Monet (1840-1926), who is considered to have produced some of the finest works of the French Impressionist painters, were a bequest of Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick in memory of her husband, Stanley McCormick, to the Santa Barbara Museum of art in 1968.

CHARING CROSS BRIDGE had been purchased from the artist by his long-time friend and art dealer Durand-Ruel in Paris on Nov. 27, 1901 and sold by the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York to Stanley R. McCormick on Jan. 8, 1902. WATERLOO BRIDGE was in the possession of J.Oehme for only a short time(we lack the acquisition date) but it was sold to Durand-Ruel in Paris Feb. 16,1903 and purchased by Stanley McCormick on March 10, 1904.

There are various labels on the verso of each painting, a Durand-Ruel label and those of numerous exhibits where the paintings were shown. Upon receipt of the paintings in 1968, the registrar reported a 1 1/4" scrape above the bottom, 14 1/2" from the left edge of the CHARING CROSS BRIDGE painting,as well as an old glue drop on the lower right corner. The WATERLOO BRIDGE painting was slightly cockled (puckered, curled, blistered) had some old cracks and there was some old paint loss. No conservation work was done on either painting, but in 1974 both canvases were restretched. In 1979 the Balboa Art Conservation Center inspected both paintings and recommended normal care and handling. Both paintings have been shown in various exhibitions in the United States and in England.

The 37 views of the Thames were all done in the same way. Monet happened to go to London in September of 1899 to look into a school for his youngest son, not intending to do any painting.

The circumstances were far different for him than 29 years earlier when, as a young, impoverished artist, he had gone into self-exile in London during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. The youthful Monet had trudged about the parks and along the banks of the Thames in dedication to his belief in painting out-of-doors directly from nature. London had been good to him then, for it was during this visit that he met the celebrated Parisian art dealer.Durand-Ruel. This was the commencement of a friendship and business relationship which lasted a lifetime. It was the beginning of a change in Monet's life, as money started to come in for actual necessities and it became possible for him to provide for his wife and small son. Life had been a struggle until then.

Born in Paris in 1840, he spent his early years in LeHavre, where the river Seine meets the sea, and this established his lifelong obsession as an artist with the motif of the Seine Valley and the coast. He showed early promise in his drawing classes at school and by the age of sixteen he was already becoming known for his clever caricatures. A friend and fellow artist, Eugene Boudin persuaded him to work out-of-doors and to try pastels and oils while painting the landscape.

In 1859, Monet moved to Paris and pursued informal art studies, but his life was interrupted by the military draft and he spent a year serving with his regiment in Algeria, where the clear,bright light further encouraged his ambition to become a landscape painter.

He returned to Paris and this time enrolled in formal art instruction in the studio of Charles Gleyre, the celebrated Academic painter. There he met fellow students Bazille, Renoir, and Sisley, and they became lifelong friends. Years of frustrated attempts followed to have his paintings accepted by the Salon,which was the only effective showcase where art might be viewed by prospective buyers. However the Salon, dominated by the Academic painters and juried by the professors of the Academie de Beaux Artes, had definite guidelines for acceptance.

Religious and historical subjects were at the top, portraits next, with landscapes almost as last choice. Every so often one of his paintings was accepted by the Salon or exhibited in the window of an art supply shop and sold, but there was never enough money to keep the creditors from the door, especially since in 1867 his son Jean was born to his mistress Camille.

Not only was his subject matter unacceptable to the Salon, but his painting style as well. He and his group of friends, now including Camille Pisarro, shared a new found assumption about the nature of painting. They insisted on painting in the open air and on the the use of bright, prismatic colors. Light and the exchange of colored reflections were the unifying elements of a picture; no longer did they rely on the traditional method of drawing, outline or sharp contrasts of light and shade. In all this, they were influenced by the impact of science, chiefly on the field of optical research, especially the constitution of colors and the structure of light. The scientist usually associated with the Impressionist theories was Eugene Chevreul, a French chemist. His principle was that colors in proximity influence and modify one another. He also observed, that any color seen alone seems to be surrounded by a faint aureole of it complimentary color.

In experimenting with woolen threads, Chevreul, director of the Gobelins tapestry factory, found that two threads of a different dye appear to have a single color when seen together from a distance. These theories led the group to tinge shadow with colors complimentary to the color of the object, casting the shadow. They juxtaposed colors with short, choppy strokes on the canvas, for the eye to fuse it at a distance, thus producing colors which were more intense than could be achieved by mixing on the palette.

Then too, there was the challenge of photography; which was just becoming popular. No painted image could rival it for representational accuracy. Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera. In 1874, Monet's circle of artists decided to exhibit together outside of the Salon. They were dubbed Impressionist by unfriendly critic's derisive view of one of Monet's works, listed in the catalogue "Impression: Sunrise." The public reception was mocking and hostile and continued so through four Impressionist exhibits. When works were sold, the prices were low.

In 1879, Monet's wife Camille died after giving birth to his second son, and he set up housekeeping with Alice Hoschede and her children.

Monet's artistic output was prodigious. He traveled to Normandy, to the Mediterranean, and to Holland. He continued to show with the Impressionists, but also at exhibitions organized by Durand-Ruel, including one in New York.

Slowly his style began to change. In his early years, he had been a recorder of visual images, but was now questioning his own approach and trying rather to capture the "envelope", the atmosphere surrounding an object. In order to do this, he would set up many canvases and move from one to another as the light changed. He used the work "series" to describe a group of canvases under way at the same time. There are whole sequences of paintings of near identical subjects, worked up together as a group, and what he wanted was to have them exhibited together as an artistic unit. For the next ten years, he painted "series" of "Haystacks", "Poplars" and the Rouen Cathedral". They were accepted with enthusiasm and sold at fabulous prices. Monet had arrived! He married Alice Hoschede and together with all the children, the lived a respectable life in Giverny, entertaining artists and writers from Europe and America.

In 1899, he decided to go to London. This time he was able to Check into the Savoy Hotel, in a room with a balcony facing the Thames. On the right was Charing Cross Bridge and on the left was Waterloo Bridge, and close by were the Houses of Parliament; the whole scene was bathed in a splendidly colored fog.

We have many accounts from friends of Monet and Journalists who interviewed him in London at the time. He set up 100 or so canvases, working feverishly, carefully coordinating color harmonies as a means of suggesting atmospheric effects. He laid brushstroke on brushstroke, knowing exactly which phenomena of light each brushstroke represented. He would work for, say, 15 minutes on a canvas, and when the light changed, move on to the next, and so on. Monet kept returning to the Savoy for months at a time, but because of ill health, had to resign himself to retouching and reworking some of the canvases from memory in his studio in Giverny.

In the SBMA canvas CHARING CROSS BRIDGE, the very light grey priming on the canvas, showing through thin paint layers, has preserved the luminosity of the sky. It is an airy vision of the river, the mist is suffused with endlessly varied, delicate harmonies of fragile colors of blue, green, pink, and yellow. Smoke and fog surround the bridge and boat in the water. Because of the thinness of the paint surface, it might have dried overnight an evidence suggests the CHARING CROSS BRIDGE may have been one of the canvases that was worked on once and took an hour to complete. In contrast, the SBMA canvas of WATERLOO BRIDGE with dense impasto layers would have taken weeks rather than days to dry and is possibly one of the paintings that were worked on for more than 60 hours. The blues of the architectural mass of the bridge loom against a richly colored sky of purple, mauve, and yellow, and the heavy impasto brushstrokes in the water shimmering jewel-like colors of turquoise and amethyst.

Many color effects of the Thames series were improvised and added late in the execution of the canvases, especially the effects of sunlight on the water. The 37 views of London were exhibited in 1904 to great critical acclaim and are presently in the collections of major museums of the world.

Monet died on December 5, 1926, 23 years after the "Views of London Series" was completed. Although plagued by failing eyesight, he continued to paint in his garden in Giverny, which is now open to the public, the house and garden looking exactly the way they were when he lived there.

Among the major figures of the movement, Monet alone remained faithful to the Impressionist view of nature. He only had a palette to work with, but as the author Charles Leger observed, "It was a palette of diamonds and precious stones."

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books:
Pool, Phoebe, IMPRESSIONISM, New York and Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1967
House, John, MONET, Oxford, Phaidon PressLimited, 1981.
Gordon, Robert and Forge, Andrew, MONET, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.1983
Stuckey, Charle F. MONET:A RETROSPECTIVE, New York, HughLauter Levin Associates Inc. Distributed by Scribner Book Co. 1985(see pages 225-229)
Kahn, Gustave, "The Claude Monet Exhibition", Gazette de Beaux Arts, July 1, 1904

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Adele C Nachman, February 5, 1987

POSTSCRIPT

Although Monet was able to finish nearly a dozen views of Charing Cross and Waterloo bridges in 1899 and 1900, he became frustrated with the more than eighty others that he had started and was unable to bring them to completion for another four years.

What was the problem? Ostensibly it was the variability of London's climate. By nine o'clock in the morning, he could have already worked on five canvases; by noon, fifteen.

- Paul Henrey Tucker, Monet in the '90s (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989) 248.


GUIDE BY CELL

Guide by Cell Script
Marcos Christodoulou

• We are standing in front of Charing Cross Bridge, an oil painting by French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, from 1899.

• The bridge divides the scene evenly in two. A glistening Thames river flows in a gentle diagonal, taking our eye to the Houses of Parliament, and to Big Ben rising out of the haze in the distance. The whole scene is bathed in the faint light of the infamous London fog.

• It can be said, in fact, that what Monet painted for us here is not a cityscape, but light as it’s changed by this cityscape; he paints what light does when it bounces around in the haze, when it’s reflected on a river flowing lazily to some sea, when it lands on a stone bridge, and on a tree-lined promenade.

• The Impressionists turned away from the subjects and techniques that came before them. They painted with loose, almost approximate brushstrokes. Since they were interested in light and its effects, they painted the way light and vision actually work in real life. So, they often let the eye of the viewer “mix” colors, instead of blending them first on the palette. We look at this painting from several feet away, and the colors are even, and vivid, and blended.

• But step closer and you’ll see that perhaps the purples are actually made up of brushstrokes of reds and blues close together. The oranges may be flecks of yellows and reds.

• The Impressionists painted from life, outdoors, real scenes and real people from everyday life. They were affected by the development of photography, by its precision and immediacy. We can see this here, the way Claude Monet crafts a photographic snapshot-like composition of a timeless river.

• Thank you and enjoy your visit to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

This is one of a series of canvases executed by Monet during three trips to London made in 1899,
1900, and 1901. He was probably inspired by the example of his friend, the artist James McNeill
Whistler, who had long been fascinated with the Thames and its moody, atmospheric effects.

Monet painted this view of Charing Cross Bridge from his sixth-floor hotel room in the Savoy
Hotel on the Victoria Embankment, where he stayed for six weeks in 1899. The square Victoria
Tower of the Houses of Parliament and the pointed spire of Big Ben are ghostly silhouettes in the
shimmering early morning fog. The near dissolution of form in a vaporous mist is typical of
Monet’s late, poetic work.

- Ridley-Tree Reopening, 2021