Between 1899 and 1901, Monet visited London in winter, painting views of the Thames. He took a suite of rooms at the Savoy Hotel, on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the river, and from his hotel window painted views of Charing Cross railway bridge looking upstream to the right and Waterloo Bridge to the left. Monet’s London paintings are characterized by a desire to record the atmospheric light effects of sunshine diffused by the combination of fog, mist and coal smoke prevalent in the city during the winter months.

This previously unknown study of Waterloo Bridge is a significant addition to the small corpus of pastels produced by Monet during his third and final stay in London in 1901. Having arrived at the end of January to find that his painting materials had been held up at customs, Monet immediately produced ‘a few pastel sketches’, as he wrote in a letter to his wife Alice. The following day he wrote again to Alice: ‘[I] continue to experiment with pastel. I enjoy it very much even though I’m not accustomed to using it; it keeps me busy and may even help me.’ The next day he wrote of his pastels, ‘it is true that I am not wasting my time on this: I am looking a great deal and observing what I will be working on; I am making many pastel studies which function as exercises, however, I would prefer to be more gainfully employed.’ By the 1st of February he was back at work on his paintings, but still wrote to Alice that ‘It is thanks to my pastels, made swiftly, that I realized how to proceed.’ This group of pastels may, therefore, be precisely dated to the end of January and the first few days of February 1901. Like the paintings themselves, the London pastels reflect the artist’s obsessive study of the motifs in front of him, and especially of the atmospheric effects he wanted to reproduce.

In all, twenty-six pastels from Monet’s third visit to London in 1901 are known, including sixteen views of Waterloo Bridge, and to these may now be added the present sheet, which has remained in a Swiss collection for over sixty years and has never before been exhibited. Signed in full by the artist, it was certainly regarded by Monet as a finished work of art, to be sold to a collector or given as a gift to a friend. This is true of almost all of the London pastels, and it is interesting to note that, despite having been produced simply to occupy his time while waiting for his painting materials to arrive, these works on paper appear to have been held in high regard by the artist. Monet’s London pastels of 1901 were his last works in the medium, which he does not seem to have taken up again after his return to France. Indeed, Daniel Wildenstein describes them as ‘a veritable swansong in the field of pastel that had been abandoned for several years…[and] the most important series’ of pastels by the artist. This splendid pastel of Waterloo Bridge, previously unpublished and until recently completely unknown to scholars, is a magnificent addition to this small but significant facet of Monet’s late draughtsmanship.