The Japanese Bridge - Painting by Claude Monet

The Japanese Bridge by Claude Monet, is again not a single painting but a complete series of not less than 236 paintings which were painted in 1899 the French Impressionist artist. The medium for the paintings is oil on canvas. Most of the canvases that belong to this series are square in shape.

These paintings show a Japanese bridge and a pond which is dotted with water lilies. Monet’s inspiration for The Japanese Bridge was the bridge in the garden of his house in Giverny. Monet had got this water garden built about ten years after he had bought the property. For the water garden, he specially bought a piece of marshland which was located across the road from his house. Initially he faced stiff resistance from the villagers of Giverny who thought that the pond would contaminate the river to which it was connected. Monet finally got permission to construct the water garden which filled his thoughts for the next thirty years. In fact, this bridge can be seen in quite a few of his paintings which were painted post 1890 such as the Water Lily Pond. The Japanese Bridge belongs to the sequence known as the Water Lilies.

Monet started working on The Japanese Bridge in 1895 before he went away to Norway. He finally began painting the subject with full vigor only in 1898.

In these paintings the sky can be seen only as a reflection and the plants and weeping willows that surround the pond, lend perspective. The brush strokes in the Japanese bridge series are strong but free flowing and animated. Monet has used colors liberally. Green has been used in a pattern that is spread out all over the canvases while white provides the effect of light shimmering on the surface of the water.

Of the Japanese Bridge series, ten paintings were put on display at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. The paintings received rave reviews and even Degas, who was not very favorably disposed towards Monet’s paintings, expressed his desire to buy one of the paintings. Though one is not sure if Degas did eventually buy the painting. The painting did not figure in the auction catalogue that inventoried the paintings in his studio in 1918.

The Japanese Bridge, Green Harmony was acquired by Isaac de Camondo the day after the opening of Durand-Ruel’s exhibition. A few years later, Isaac de Camondo gifted his collection of fourteen paintings by Monet, which included The Japanese Bridge, Green Harmony to the Louvre.

Haystacks as exhibited in the New York Museum of Metropolitan Art

Monet’s Haystack series comprises 25 to 28 paintings which were executed in 1891. In the same year, 15 of these were exhibited and immediately sold. This was not only a monetary success taking account of the adverse reactions that Monet’s previous works had received. All of Monet’s haystack paintings are executed as oil and measure about 25 × 39 inches, i.e 60 cm × 100 cm.

A second series, usually referred to as the Giverny series, showing hay- or grainstacks was executed by the Monet one year earlier (1888) from the preceding harvest at Giverny. All three show each two grainstacks in front of a hill under the influence of different seasons, weather and light. One shows the stacks in the light of evening sun, another during daylight, set against a blue sky and a line of trees (poplars) while the third shows the haystacks in a white and frozen landscape under either a rising or a setting sun.

Giverny, 1889: Two Haystacks at sunset

Giverny, 1889: Daylight with blue sky and poplars

Giverny, 1889: Haystacks in Winterly Landscape

However, typically, the Haystack paintings are associated with the works from Monet’s second, larger, series. The series comprises 25 paintings, most of the showing each two haystacks. The artist began working on his Haystacks series in 1890 and with this he entered also a new phase: He studied his subjects under the influence of changing light and weather conditions. Several of his most famous series were created this way: starting out with the haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the House of Parliament, Water Lilies or Mornings at the Seine should follow. All were painted during different seasons, different times of the day but basically keeping the same angle for the motif. Thus, Monet was able to reproduce a perfect impression of the changing impression a motif would make during a day and across the seasons.

Monet used a method where he worked on a number of paintings at the same time by spending just a little while on each before moving on to the next. This meant he had to work very quickly as he worked from one canvas to another. His stepdaughter, Blanche, helped him in this by sliding the canvases onto his easel.

Monet’s haystacks were a considerable influence on latter day painters like Vlaminck, Derain, Kadinsky and the Fauves. Kadinsky in fact, saw Monet’s paintings in Moscow and Munich and said that they had a profound influence over him.

The majority of the Haystack series canvases fetched a minimum of 1000 francs each. This not only helped Monet who had often monetary problems, but also hiked up the rate of Monet’s paintings further. He used the money from the sale of these paintings to buy the house and surrounding land in Giverny. This is where he got the water lily pond built, which he later used as the subject of his paintings.

Monet Haystack Gallery

Grainstack in Sunshine

Haystacks at the End of Summer

Grainstack in sunlight

Haystack on a Foggy Morning

Haystack at morning in a snowy landscape

Wheatstacks at sunset covered with snow

All of the 33 paintings show Rouen Cathedral. In 30 of them Monet painted the cathedral’s front; three paintings show small sections of the cathedral. The Gothic facade is shown in an extreme close-up, though it is no realistic or detailed representation of the building’s architecture. The essential elements of the paintings are rather the reproduction of the buildings interaction with different shades of light and weather conditions.

Claude Monet painted the first versions of Rouen Cathedral from a direct frontal view. The spotlight moved over time more and more to the right, as Monet changed his position. Overall, there are five different perspectives from which the paintings were executed.

Claude Monet executed most paintings of the Rouen Cathedral series during 1892/1893 in Rouen but completed many of them 1894 in Giverny. Hence, most works are signed and dated with 1894. Monet decided for the motif during a trip in 1892 and immediately started to paint the Cathedral from a vacant apartment. He could not complete this first painting as he had to return urgently to Giverny. When he arrived back to Rouen, his apartment was no longer availale and he had to choose a new location.

However, Rouen Cathedral as a motif created Monet also some headaches. He had nightmares and even destroyed some canvases. In mid-April he returned to Giverny, to recover from his efforts and doubted the quality of his cathedral paintings. The year after, Monet returned to Rouen and dedicated himself again to the subject. After he finished his work in Rouen, he completed the paintings in his studio in Giverny, in February 1894.
Claude Monet hold the Rouen Cathedral paintings back for a while cathedral for some time before he reluctantly showed them to the art dealers Paul Durand-Ruel and Bernheim. Nevertheless, Monet was well aware of the artistic value artistic of the Cathedral paintings and claimed 15,000 Francs for them. Durand-Ruel found this price to be excessive and after some discussions and waiting Monet lowered his expectations to 12,000 francs.

The paintings of the Rouen Cathedral series are now in located in various museums and collections all over the world.