Monet's Japanese Bridge Paintings, from the 1899 Series to the Late Red Canvases

Say "the Monet bridge painting" to five people and they'll picture five different things. Some see a tidy green arch over a pond crowded with lilies. Others see a blaze of rust and red where the bridge is barely there at all. Both are right. Monet painted the little wooden footbridge in his water garden at Giverny for close to thirty years, and the pictures changed as much as he did.

What follows is the whole run, in order: the few early views of 1895, the famous series of 1899–1900, and the rough, hot-colored canvases he made after 1918, when his eyesight was failing. If you already know the Monet paintings people copy most, you'll recognize the middle group. The ends of the story are stranger.

He built the view before he painted it

Monet moved his household to Giverny in 1883, into a rented house he was able to buy seven years later. In early 1893 he acquired a swampy strip across the railroad tracks from his property and asked permission to divert a small stream, the Ru, a branch of the Epte, into it. The villagers fought him. They were afraid his foreign plants would poison the water and their cattle. Monet was furious, but permission came through three months later, and he started digging.

The idea was never only horticultural. He wanted a water garden "both for the pleasure of the eye and for the purpose of having subjects to paint." He enlarged the existing pond, swapped the wild lilies for hybrids from the grower Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac in yellows, pinks, whites and violets, and put a humpback bridge across the western end.

That bridge came straight out of his print collection. Monet owned a copy of Hiroshige's Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin Shrine (1856), one of many Japanese woodblocks with a curved bridge in it. He had also seen a Japanese garden and water-lily display at the 1889 world's fair in Paris, and a Japanese gardener who visited while he was planning the site may have suggested the arch. A local craftsman built it. He planted wisteria to climb over it.

(Gardens weren't new to him. He'd painted a seaside garden at Sainte-Adresse and, in the 1870s, the one he kept at Vétheuil. Giverny was the first one he designed from scratch as a motif.)

1895: three quick looks, then a four-year pause

Monet painted the bridge three times in 1895, not long after it went up. Philadelphia owns one of those first views, and it reads almost like a print: flat, bright color, the arch set against a screen of green. It marks the start of what turned into a thirty-year obsession with the colors of his own plants.

Then he stopped. The garden had to grow in. Years later he explained the delay himself:

"It took me some time to understand my water-lilies. It takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation, how wonderful my pond was, and reached for my palette. I've hardly had any other subject since that moment."

The 1899 series: twelve canvases from one spot

In 1899 Monet came back to the bridge with a plan. He set up at a single vantage point and painted 12 works of the same view: the blue-green arch, the lilies drifting toward the far bank, willows hanging into the frame. Over 1899–1900 he made 18 versions of the motif in all.

They look calm. They aren't quite. In Washington's 1899 canvas, the top of the arch sits just under the top edge of the picture, so the greenery closes over you like a room. Period photographs show the pond was never that enclosed. Monet exaggerated it on purpose.

The perspective also refuses to settle. In the London version in Room 46, you seem to look up at the bridge and down onto the lily pads at the same time. The bridge is cropped at both sides, so it floats with nothing holding it up, and its reflection makes a dark curve along the bottom. The brushwork is thick, colors laid side by side, closer to his early Impressionist work than to the soft, blended Seine mornings he'd been painting just before.

In December 1900 Monet hung 12 of the bridge pictures at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris, all more or less symmetrical. The dealer had already bought the Washington canvas from him that January. The critic Gustave Geffroy, writing in Le Journal on November 26, 1900, described "a calm pool, immobile, rigid, and deep like a mirror, upon which white water lilies blossom forth."

How many Japanese bridge pictures are there?

There's no single tidy number, because the bridge shows up in three groups: three views in 1895, the 18 versions of 1899–1900, and a late set from 1918–1924 that Monet mostly left undated. Count all three and you pass twenty easily. The water garden as a whole gave him about 250 canvases, around 200 of them lilies on the water with no bridge in sight.

Where to see a Monet bridge painting in person

The 1899–1900 pictures scattered early, and a lot of them ended up in America. Here are the ones with firm museum records:

The Met's canvas is the odd one out: taller than it is wide, which pushes the bridge up and gives the water more room. It came to New York in 1929 with the Havemeyer bequest. Washington's traveled the longest road, from Durand-Ruel to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1920, then through private hands in New York and Los Angeles before arriving as a gift in 1992.

And the bridge itself? You can walk on it at Giverny, though it's a rebuild. By the time the garden was restored the original was too far gone, so a firm from nearby Vernon made a new one in beech. The house and garden have been open to visitors since September 1980. If you're planning the trip, a walk through the garden itself covers what to look for.

After 1900 the bridge drops out

The series was a turning point. Monet enlarged the pond again in 1901 and in 1904, tripling the water garden, and his view kept narrowing. The banks went first, then the bridge, until he was painting only water, reflections and lilies, which is where his later lily canvases come from. That road ends at the Grandes Décorations: 22 enormous panels, each over two meters high and more than 90 meters long in total, now in two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris.

For a while there was almost nothing. Monet stopped working after the deaths of his second wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. When he started again during the First World War, he built a huge new studio, finished in 1916, for the big panels.

The late red bridges, 1918–1924

Then, alongside the murals, he went back to the bridge on easel-size canvases. These are the ones that surprise people.

In a panoramic version two meters wide, dated 1918, the only thing you can still identify is a thin arch crossing from one side to the other. Everything else is broken brushwork, packed so densely that the space seems to fill up. By the early 1920s the structure goes too. The greens turn to rust, orange and deep red, the strokes run vertical, and the bridge becomes a loop of color you find only because you know it's supposed to be there.

Many of these late bridges never left the family. They weren't shown in Monet's lifetime. When his son Michel left everything to the Musée Marmottan Monet in 1966, the house in Giverny and over a hundred canvases went with it, and the museum became the only one holding the last Japanese Bridge paintings. (It had owned the harbor sunrise that named Impressionism since 1940.) When a 2019 exhibition on Monet's final years in Fort Worth gathered the late work, it included seven studies of the bridge.

Why do the late ones look so different?

Partly his eyes. Cataracts had been diagnosed a few years earlier and they skewed the balance of his colors. The Paris museum is frank that in the unsigned canvas of 1918–1924 it's hard to say whether the work is even finished, because the motif is almost unreadable. There's more on how his failing sight shifted the palette in a separate piece.

But I don't think eyesight explains all of it. The roughness looks chosen. What mattered to him at this point was the light and the air between himself and the thing he was looking at, painting the act of seeing rather than the bridge. That idea, painting seeing itself, is the path to modern art that runs through these pictures. The 1899 bridge is the one people put on their walls. The 1920s bridge is the one that changed painting.

Two bridges, one choice

If you want the bridge at home, decide first which Monet you're living with: the cool, orderly arch of 1899 or the burning late one. Either can be painted by hand in oil on canvas, like the rest of his work on our easels. And if you're still choosing between artists, start with the pictures people ask us for most.

Sources

• National Gallery of Art, The Japanese Footbridge (1899)
• National Gallery, London, The Water-Lily Pond
• Philadelphia Museum of Art, Japanese Footbridge, Giverny (1895)
• Musée Marmottan Monet, Le Pont japonais (1918)
• Musée Marmottan Monet, Le Pont japonais (1918–1924)
• Musée Marmottan Monet, the Claude Monet collection
• Kimbell Art Museum, Monet: The Late Years