MURA · THE COLLECTION · CLAUDE MONET

Charing Cross Bridge, London

The iron skeleton of Charing Cross Bridge crosses the Thames in the fog, and behind it the Houses of Parliament rise as a ghost. Claude Monet painted it in 1901 from a window of the Savoy Hotel, one of almost a hundred canvases of the river he made in London between 1899 and 1905.

Claude Monet · 1901 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns this painting, describes "the rectilinear skeleton of Charing Cross Bridge, reminiscent of bridges in Japanese prints, which the artist collected", and beyond it "the ghostlike silhouette of the Houses of Parliament". Everything is seen through smoke and mist. The bridge is a railway bridge, and a train is a smudge of steam across it; the towers of Parliament are lighter than the sky they stand against.

How it was painted

Monet took a room at the Savoy in September 1899 because it "offered an extensive viewpoint" over the river. From there he painted two motifs, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge; the Houses of Parliament he painted from Saint Thomas's Hospital across the water. The Art Institute writes that "in the smoggy, industrial city, Monet challenged himself to capture effects of light seen through a dense atmospheric screen". He said of London that without the fog it "wouldn't be beautiful", and the fog is the subject as much as the bridge. Many of the canvases were begun in London and finished at Giverny, which led some critics to doubt them.

Where it went

Monet sold the painting to Durand-Ruel in October 1905 for 8,000 francs; the dealer's stock book lists it as "Londres, Charing Cross Bridge, soleil couchant, 1901". It passed to the Prince de Wagram in Paris two months later for 15,000 francs, came back to Durand-Ruel in 1914, and reached Chicago in the Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection. It hangs in Gallery 243.

Why it is in Mura

Of all the works in Mura this is the one that changes most with the light in your own room. In the evening the bridge disappears into the screen and only the towers are left.