Exhibition Review on Monet's Waterloo Bridge Series

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Judith H Dobrzynski, Paintings That Span London's Many Moods; Wall Street Journal, Jan 29, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mon ... y-moods-11548710975
http://www.judithdobrzynski.com/ ... ridge-series-review

Summary in the window of print: Monet's paintings of Waterloo Bridge reveal his process and his experience of the city.

Note:
(a) This is an exhibit review on
Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process. Worcester Art Museum, Jan 25 – Apr 28, 2019
https://www.worcesterart.org/exhibitions/waterloo-bridge/
("Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process brings together nine stellar versions of Claude Monet's well-known series of paintings depicting London's Waterloo Bridge. These paintings, which include WAM's own 1903 version of the iconic London landmark, reveal the breadth of Monet's emphasis on color, light, and density. Monet's later paintings often relied on the concept of seriality, sometimes resulting in dozens of variations of the same subject. His Waterloo Bridge series presents an ensemble that, collectively, expresses the essential qualities Monet found inherent to the River Thames' fog-bound landscape")
(b)
(i) Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
(ii) Worcester Art Museum (1898- ; private)
(iii)
(A) Waterloo Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Bridge
(table: Opened (first bridge) 1817, (second bridge) 1942
(B) Help Category:Waterloo Bridge by Claude Monet
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wi ... dge_by_Claude_Monet

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(c) "When Claude Monet (1840-1926) looked at Waterloo Bridge, spanning the River Thames in London, he saw something else: potential and opportunity. Intrigued by London's weather, he decided to use Waterloo Bridge to give structure to a series of paintings that would attempt to evoke the city's light, air and atmosphere, especially fog and smog. During the winters of 1899 through 1901, he set up his paints in the Savoy hotel on the river's north bank, and rendered the bridge 41 times (more than either the Houses of Parliament or the Charing Cross Bridge, his two other London series). * * * 'Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process' at the Worcester Art Museum unites nine of those 41 paintings in one gallery. The bridge stretches across each, but its appearance alters in color and context, fades in and out of focus, and in one case—'Waterloo Bridge' (1900-1901) from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College—almost disappears entirely. Unusually, this nearly abstract work shows a brilliant orange sun, surrounded by flecks of violet clouds. Painted in long, striated brushstrokes, it was still in Monet's studio when he died, and is probably unfinished. But it illuminates Monet's process: He would first cover the entire canvas with a base image in thinly applied paint, and then proceed to add and make changes. Besides, it's beautiful.
The Davis painting also highlights a noteworthy point of this exhibition, which originated, in slightly different form, at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Monet is known for painting outdoors—Impressionism, after all, was about capturing the moment. But here he worked on many paintings at once, lining up as many as 15 canvases and moving from one to another as the sun moved across the sky, the air grew sootier as industrial plants cranked up for the day, and the fog lifted or thickened. Then he took them all back with him to Giverny [Monet lived there 1883-1926], France. There he continued to work on them "obsessively," as Nancy Norwood, the Rochester museum's curator of European art, writes in the exhibition catalog. These paintings are "rarely as spontaneous and direct as they appear,' she adds.
(i)
(A) Charing Cross Bridge (Monet series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_Bridge_(Monet_series)
(B) Charing Cross
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross
("The name of the area, Charing, is derived from the Old English word [noun feminine meaning cierring] 'cierring,' referring to a bend in the River Thames.  The addition of the name 'Cross' to the hamlet's name originates from the Eleanor cross erected in 1291–94 by King Edward I as a memorial to his wife, Eleanor of Castile")
(C) Hungerford Bridge and Golden Jubilee Bridges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu ... den_Jubilee_Bridges
("Hungerford Bridge [opened 1964; 'was named after the then Hungerford Market, because it went from the South Bank to Hungerford Market on the north side of the Thames'] * * * is a steel truss railway bridge flanked by two more recent, cable-stayed, pedestrian bridges [Golden Jubilee Bridges, which opened 2002]")

"The Queen's Golden Jubilee Footbridges run either [both; there are two: one Golden Jubilee Bridge on each side of Hungerford Bridge] side of Hungerford Railway Bridge": from the Web.
(ii) Savoy hotel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy_Hotel (1889- ;

Savoy is a historical region in southeastern corner of France.
(iii)
(A) Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge. Davis Museum (Object No: 1987.9)
https://dms.wellesley.edu/detail ... &module=objects )1899-1903.
(B) Wellesley College opened the door to students in 1875. In 1889 The College set up a museum to house its collections of memorabilia. Per Savis Museum website: "In 1988, Trustee and alumna Kathryn Wasserman Davis (Class of 1928) and her husband Shelby Cullom Davis gave the cornerstone gift to the campaign specifically to benefit the construction of a new museum."

contains 23 of 44 in the series.
(v) Giverny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giverny

is about 30-mile air distance, west-northwest of Paris.

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(d) "Visitors can see that in 'Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk' (1904) from the National Gallery of Art. Documents show that Monet painted the bridge only in the morning. If this hazy all-over turquoise wonder is a nocturne—and the glowing lights on the faint gray bridge suggest that it may be—Monet conjured the evening atmosphere."

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk. 1904. National Gallery of Art (Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon 1983.1.27)
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.61377.html
(i) National Gallery of Art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

is not part of Smithsonian museums.
(ii) Paul was grandson of Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank
(iii)
(A) nocturne (n; ultimately from Latin nocturnus)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nocturne
(B) Latin-English dictionary:
* nocturnus (adjective masculine; from [noun feminine] nox night +‎ -urnus "suffix forming adjectives), on the analogy of diurnus"):
"of or belonging to the night, nocturnal"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nocturnus

(e) "In two paintings, "Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather" (1900) and especially "Waterloo Bridge" (1903), the latter from Worcester's collection, the mood is bleaker, the weather heavier. Several boats add to the smoky, industrial feel of the Worcester painting. The other, from the Art Institute of Chicago, feels lighter, with less contrast. Traffic is portrayed in blues and whites, rather than the orange and green in Worcester's work, and just one lone boat peeks through an arch of the bridge."

Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather. The Art Institute of Chicago.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/1 ... bridge-gray-weather
(Date: 1900; Credit Line Gift of Mrs Mortimer B Harris; Reference Number 1984.1173_

Quote (www.artic.edu): "If not for the fog, Claude Monet once remarked, 'London wouldn't be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.' While working on his London series, he rose early every day to paint Waterloo Bridge in the morning, moving on to Charing Cross Bridge at midday and in the afternoon. He observed both motifs from his fifth-floor window at the Savoy Hotel. The Art Institute’s two Waterloo Bridge paintings are dated 1900 and 1903, but both were likely begun in 1900 and dated only when Monet felt that they were finished. He worked on all of his London paintings in his studio in Giverny, refusing to send any of them to his dealer until he was satisfied with them as an ensemble.