Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames

Between 1899 and 1901, Monet visited London three times, for a total of more than seven months. He rented the same room on the sixth floor of the Savoy Hotel on the Victoria Embankment and painted the view from his window of south London and the Thames. The resultant works — more than a hundred paintings and twenty pastels — formed the largest series he had produced to that date. Here, as in other works, he layers blue, green, and pink tones on a cool backdrop, offering an atmospheric view of the riverfront. This oil was included in an exhibition of his views of the Thames at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1904. René Gimpel, a prominent art dealer in Paris, visited Monet at his home years later and quoted him in his diary as having said: “I adore London; it’s a mass, a whole, and it’s so simple. But what I love more than anything in London is the fog.”