本帖最后由 choi 于 2-2-2019 13:43 编辑
(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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