A Mountain of Canvases

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect 1903 Claude Monet

Passion is a necessary component of the artist’s life. But when does passion become self-defeating obsession?

From 1899 through the early 1900s, Claude Monet had a passion for painting the Waterloo Bridge and the Charing Cross Bridge (now called Hungerford Bridge) from the balconies of his rooms at the Savoy Hotel in London. He was obsessed with capturing the fleeting effects of the changing light and fog over the Thames River. He used multiple canvases, switching from one to another as the light effects changed. He wrote, “The fog in London assumes all sorts of colours. There are black, brown, yellow, green and purple fogs and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs. My practised eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere. The challenge is to get every change down on canvas.”

“At the Savoy Hotel, or at St Th…