Charing Cross Bridge

Charing Cross Bridge is a series of oil paintings by French artist Claude Monet. The paintings depict a misty, impressionist Charing Cross Bridge in London, England. Monet worked on the series from 1899 to 1905, creating a total of 37 paintings depicting the bridge. While all of the paintings in the series depict the same bridge, each has unique qualities. For instance, Monet uses different color combinations to portray different atmospheric conditions. In some paintings, Monet includes details such as trains, clock towers, and boats, but omits such features in others. Today, the Charing Cross Bridge paintings are scattered in museums around the world. These include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Context Under exile during the Franco-Prussian War, Monet travelled to London for the first time in 1870. He became enthralled with the city, and vowed to return to it someday. Monet's fascination with London lay primarily in its fogs, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Writers hypothesize that Monet was also inspired by contemporaries J. M. W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who were similarly fascinated by London's atmosphere. Thus, in 1899, Monet returned to London and rented a room in the Savoy Hotel, which offered an extensive viewpoint from which to begin his series of the city.