Waterloo Bridge in London

Monet painted his London views during three trips between 1899 and 1901, yet this canvas is signed and dated 1902 in the lower left corner. In London he worked from the Savoy Hotel above the Thames, switching between canvases as the fog and light shifted, and he finished many of them later in his studio at Giverny, far from the river they show. This one then made a much longer journey. The Kobe businessman Kojiro Matsukata probably bought it from Monet himself around 1921, but it stayed in France with the part of his collection kept there. In 1944 the French state sequestered it, and only in January 1959 was it handed over to Japan. That April it entered the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which opened the same year to house the returned Matsukata Collection.