Charing Cross Bridge (overcast day), 1900

Monet dated this canvas 1900 and then held on to it for five more years. Only in October 1905 did he sell it to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, and in January 1907 the firm sold it to Joseph Derwin Hubbard and his wife in Chicago. Their daughter Janet had been born in 1904, so the picture came into the house when she was a small child, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life. She died in 1977 and left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in memory of her mother. The view is of London, seen from Monet's hotel balcony above the Thames. Charing Cross Bridge carried the railway over the river into Charing Cross station, and he painted it some 35 times, starting in the autumn of 1899. The title gives this one's weather, an overcast day. The museum points to the yellow sunlight glittering on the water through a violet fog, and beyond the bridge the towers of the Houses of Parliament, nearly lost in the haze.