Interpretive Resource

Claude Monet painted Charing Cross Bridge, London in 1901, during the last of three consecutive winter trips to the English capital. The artist stayed on the sixth floor of the Savoy Hotel; looking to his right he could see the railway bridge running from Charing Cross Station and beyond it the neo-Gothic towers of the Palace of Westminster.

The Art Institute’s canvas reveals Monet’s fascination with the golden light of early morning, filtered through London’s characteristic fog, which is dispersed and transformed into veils of lavender-pink, lemon yellow, and powder blue. The overall mood is expansive, encompassing the past, as seen in the city’s historicist architecture, as well as the present, represented by a speeding train.

While awaiting the arrival from customs of multiple crates of unfinished canvases from his previous London sojourns, Monet engaged in two activities that may have had an indirect effect on this and other paintings he took up subsequently: he read excerpts from the journals of the great Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, and he made pastels of Thames motifs from his hotel-room window. Perhaps Delacroix’s belief in the expressive potential of color, together with the soft, matte quality of pastel pigments, helped Monet to conceptualize and achieve this poetic yet energetic depiction of a city that had fascinated him for decades.