RCEWA – Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the painting meets Waverley criteria one, two and three. Further Information The ‘Applicant’s statement’ and the ‘Note of Case History’ are available on the Arts Council Website: www.artscouncil.org.uk/reviewing-committee-case-hearings EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Claude Monet (1840-1926) Charing Cross Bridge, 1904 Oil on canvas 65 x 94 cm Charing Cross Bridge is one of the series of paintings of the Thames that Claude Monet made during and after his visits to London in 1899-1901. It shows the railway bridge with the sun reflected on the river and filtered through the smog which partially conceals the Houses of Parliament on the right. Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and The Palace of Westminster were the motifs that drew Monet back over three successive years. At an early stage he was preparing a series to be shown together and, while he was assiduous in resolving each of the paintings, his process involved continuous comparison and adjustment. He worked on at least ninety-four canvases which have survived the subsequent process of excising and destroying others, and he eventually selecting thirty-seven to exhibit in Vues de la Tamise à Londres at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in May 1904. Of the three Thames subseries that constituted the whole, thirty-four paintings depicting Charing Cross Bridge are recorded in the catalogue raisonné. As it was his practice to begin in front of the motif, it has been assumed that the present canvas was started in London in 1901. He continued to work on the paintings in his studio at Giverny, and inscribed this work in 1904. Despite this, it was not among those eventually chosen by Monet and his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for the exhibition that year. The success of the exhibition and the prominence of this series allowed Monet to withdraw into making the Water Lily paintings over the ensuing years. The reputation that he established has rarely waned and his continuing importance is witnessed in two London exhibitions featuring his work in depth in 2018 alone. This painting is, in this sense, of indisputable aesthetic value in itself (Waverley 2) and for its part in Monet’s pivotal series. It is, in addition, an object that is significant to the history of taste in Britain (in relation to Waverley criterion 1), as one of the few of the Thames paintings to have returned to and remained in this country. Monet saw London as a contemporary city through the modern haze of industrial pollution, turning this into a sequence of chromatically charged images that changed how the city could be seen. The fact that both the painter and his dealer, from different vantage points, saw the London series as significant is a measure of the importance of this group in reinforcing Monet’s wider reputation. This is one of the few paintings to find a British purchaser in defiance of a prevailing conservative response to the artist’s production. While Monet is very widely studied and scrutinised there continues to be new research associated with his work (Waverley 3), as both Monet and Architecture (National Gallery) and Impressionists in London (Tate Britain) have recently demonstrated. Research into the social and political networks to which Monet’s London connections bear witness has the potential to cast a new light on a crucial period locally, nationally and internationally. DETAILED CASE Claude Monet (1840-1926) Charing Cross Bridge, 1904 Oil on canvas 65 x 94 cm signed and dated ‘Claude Monet 1904’ Provenance: Acquired Christie’s London, 6 May 1932, lot.125, by 9th Duke of Marlborough, Woodstock, Oxfordshire; Whose sale, Christie’s London, 22 June 1934, lot.114, where acquired by M. Laminne, France; From whom acquired by Captain F. C. Gordon; Sold by his executors, Sotheby’s London, 15 February 1950, lot.146, where acquired by A. L. d’Antal; From whom acquired by Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London; Where acquired by Alexander Margulies, 1950 Thence by descent. Selected exhibitions: Coronation Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Ben Uri Art Gallery, London, June-July 1953, no.1 (as Thames Landscape) Claude Monet, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, August-September 1957 and Tate Gallery, London, September-November 1957, no.103, repr. pl.23e (as Charing Cross Bridge and Westminster, Sunset) Private Views: Works from the Collections of Twenty Friends of the Tate Gallery, Tate Gallery, London, April-May 1963, no.110 (as Charing Cross Bridge and Westminster, Sunset) The Growth of London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1964, no.H1 The Impressionists in London, Hayward Gallery, London, January-March 1973, no.12 repr. p.42 (as Charing Cross Bridge and Westminster, Sunset) Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, Tate Britain, London, November 2017 - May 2018, repr. p.241 Selected literature: R. H. Wilenski, Modern French Painters, London 1963, repr. pl.G Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series, New York 1981, p.371, no.11 Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne 1979, vol.IV, no.1545, repr. p.167 Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne 1996, vol.III, no.1545, repr. p.669 Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, ‘The Thames and Westminster: From Motif to Leitmotif’, in Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London 2017, repr. pp.230-3 Claude Monet made painting trips to London in 1899, 1900 and 1901. Making his base in the Savoy Hotel, the original stay was rather exploratory, but the two further campaigns were concentrated almost exclusively on three motifs: the two bridges visible from an elevated viewpoint afforded by the glazed sunroom of his river-front room, and the view of the Houses of Parliament seen from the south bank. His letters to his wife Alice, who remained in France during the 1900 and 1901 visits, specify that his preference was for silhouetting his motif against the sun, painting the nearby Waterloo Bridge while facing east in the morning, and the slightly more distant Charing Cross Bridge (more properly Hungerford Bridge) against the afternoon sun. In the early months of 1900 and 1901, he finished the short winter days painting the Houses of Parliament back-lit by the sunset, his vantage-point on a terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital having been arranged through Mrs Charles Hunter, a patron of John Singer Sargent and Auguste Rodin. Although Waterloo Bridge was nearly one hundred years old, Monet’s subjects and views of London were otherwise modern: Hungerford Bridge and the Palace of Westminster, though of contrasting functional and revivalist styles, had both been completed in the 1860s. Above all, the fog was a sign of metropolitan modernity, and it was the drama of the atmospheric effects that determined the painter’s return during the winter months when they were at their most extreme. He told an interviewer in 1901: ‘The fog in London assumes all sorts of colours: there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs.’1 With very few exceptions, the objects seen through the fog were confined to the three architectural features united by the river. Charing Cross Bridge (previously known as Charing Cross Bridge and Westminster, Sunset) shows the railway bridge silhouetted by the hazy afternoon sun reflected in the dappled surface of the Thames. The intense reds and oranges are off-set by the greens and blues of the bridge, as well as the intrusion of greens at the edges that enhance the sense of a centralised field of vision. Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament loom beyond, but the primary focus lies in the doubled structure of the bridge (the railway bed and its shadow) as it cuts across the composition. The sense of a floating world is enhanced by Monet’s exclusion of each embankment. Gustave Geffroy, who visited Monet at The Savoy with the statesman Georges Clemenceau, marvelled at the subtlety of the painter’s vision, confessing that, on observing the view, ‘we looked 1 E. Bullet, ‘Macmonnies, the sculptor, working hard as a painter’, The Eagle, 8 September 1901, quoted in John House, ‘The Impressionist Vision of London’, in Ira Bruce Nagel and F. S. Schwarzbach eds., Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York and Oxford 1980 p.88. in vain, we still only saw an expanse of woolly grey, some confused forms, [and] the bridges as if suspended in the void’.2 In private Monet repeatedly expressed the struggle of capturing such shifting effects. His solution was to have many canvases underway at once. In 1900 he wrote to his wife that this was ‘the only means to achieve anything, in starting them in all weathers, all harmonies, it’s the only means … I have something like sixty-five canvases covered with colours’.3 As a result of this profusion of activity started in London, thirty-four paintings of Charing Cross Bridge survive, with forty-one versions of Waterloo Bridge and nineteen of the Houses of Parliament. Most of these, evidently including the current painting, were continued and finished in the artist’s studio in Giverny over the following years. The date inscribed on the current Charing Cross Bridge might suggest that it was brought to a state of completion so as to be in consideration for the eventual exhibition of thirty-seven Vues de la Tamise à Londres at the Galerie Durand-Ruel (9 May – 4 June 1904). It is not clear why it was not chosen by Monet and Paul Durand-Ruel for inclusion among the eight views of Charing Cross Bridge shown on that occasion.