Waterloo Bridge, Morning Fog

Claude Monet

Undated

Oil on canvas

65.7 x 100.2 cm

Claude Monet relished the challenge of rendering the fleeting effects of the London fog in winter. As he told a journalist in 1901, ‘The fog 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. My practiced eye has found that objects change their appearance in a London fog more, and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas.’ Here, buildings and objects gradually emerge from the foggy shroud, although some sections remain almost abstract.

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Anne Thomson in memory of her father, Frank Thomson, and her mother, Mary Elizabeth Clarke Thomson, 1954. Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art.