Waterloo Bridge. Effect of Fog

Monet loved London for the one thing tourists complained about, its fog. On three winter trips around 1900 he took a room at the Savoy Hotel, and from his balcony over the Thames he could see Waterloo Bridge to the left with factory chimneys smoking behind it. The thick London air, as much coal smoke as weather, kept changing the light by the minute, swallowing the bridge whole and letting it loom back. He chased those shifts across dozens of canvases at once, moving from one to the next as the haze shifted. This is one of them, though like most of the series he actually finished it back home in his garden at Giverny, working from studies, and dated it 1903.