Charing Cross Bridge

Charing Cross Bridge is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet, signed and dated 1899, showing the London railway bridge in fog with the Houses of Parliament beyond; it belongs to the collection of Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza and was long on deposit at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

Monet first saw London as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and returned in 1899 to paint the Thames from a high room at the Savoy Hotel. Over three winters, from 1899 to 1901, he painted views of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and Parliament; the critic Gustave Geffroy, visiting with Georges Clemenceau in 1900, recalled seeing him on his balcony with Charing Cross Bridge to his right and Waterloo Bridge to his left. Monet told the dealer René Gimpel in 1918 that what he loved most about London was the fog. Only about twelve Thames views are thought to have been finished on the spot; he reworked nearly all of them in his studio at Giverny, and in 1904 showed thirty-seven London pictures at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris.

This canvas, 64.8 by 80.6 cm and number 1531 in Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné, shows the Thames under mist in the dim light of a winter afternoon. The bridge is reduced to a flat horizontal band, a boat drifts across the shimmering water, puffs of smoke rise above the deck and the Parliament towers are only a faint silhouette. According to the collection's catalogue, Monet left out Cleopatra's Needle, which stood in this view, because atmosphere mattered more to him than topographical accuracy.

Durand-Ruel bought the painting as early as November 1901 and sold it in 1903 to the German dealer Paul Cassirer, so it was not in the 1904 exhibition. It was shown in Monet and Abstraction in Madrid in 2010. In 2021 El País reported that the canvas, taken out of Spain by Carmen Cervera in 2020, was on view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi as a loan from a private collection.