The Japanese Footbridge

1899

Claude Monet

Artist, French, 1840 - 1926

A pale turquoise footbridge arching over a pond lined with tall grasses and filled with petal-pink and butter-yellow waterlilies spans this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted with touches of vibrant color. In the top third of the composition, the shallowly arched bridge nearly touches the top edge of the canvas, and it extends off each side. The shadows on the bridge are painted with eggplant purple. Bands of waterlilies gently zigzag into the distance on the surface of the water. The spring and emerald-green grasses growing along the banks fill the space around and over the pond, and they blend into a screen of trees beyond that enclose the scene. The green of the grasses and trees is reflected in the surface of the water, as is the underside of the bridge. The artist signed and dated the work with dark paint in the lower right corner: “Claude Monet 99.”

Media Options

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In 1883 Monet moved his household, his two sons along with Alice Hoschedé and her children, to the rural community of Giverny, where he leased a house that he was able to purchase seven years later. In early 1893, he acquired a swampy area across the railroad tracks abutting his property and petitioned the village council for permission to divert a small stream into it. But it was only toward the end of that decade that he turned to the garden he had created there as a rich source of artistic inspiration.

In 1899, Monet painted 12 works from a single vantage point, focusing on the arching blue–green bridge and the microcosm of his water garden. Among the 12 works was the National Gallery's Japanese Footbridge. Monet designed and built the landscape that appears in the painting—from the bridge to the pond and its shape, to the water lilies and other plantings. The artist, who as a leader of the impressionists had espoused the spontaneity of directly observed works that capture the fleeting effects of light and color, had in these later paintings subjected a nature he re–created to sustained, meditated scrutiny.

When Monet exhibited these paintings at Durand–Ruel's gallery in 1890, a number of critics mentioned his debt to Japanese art. More telling, the impenetrable green enclosure—heightened in the National Gallery painting by the placement of the top of the bridge's arch just below the painting's top edge—harkens back to the hortus conclusus (closed garden) of medieval images, while also evoking a dreamlike contemplative zone consonant with symbolist literature, especially poems such as "Le Nénuphar blanc" by Stéphane Mallarmé. Gustave Geffroy described this effect in his review of the exhibition (Le Journal, November 26, 1900), speaking of "this minuscule pool where some mysterious corollas blossom," and "a calm pool, immobile, rigid, and deep like a mirror, upon which white water lilies blossom forth, a pool surrounded by soft and hanging greenery which reflects itself in it."

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 85


Artwork overview

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Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased January 1900 from the artist by (Durand-Ruel, Paris); sold 1920 to the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; sold 1953 to (Sam Salz, New York); sold to Henry T. Mudd, Los Angeles; by inheritance to his wife, Victoria Nebeker Coberly [Mrs. William B. Coberly, Jr., 1917-1991], Los Angeles; her estate; gift 1992 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1900

  • Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1900.

1905

  • Pictures by Boudin, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Grafton Galleries, London, 1905, no. 136, as The Water Lily Pond.

1920

  • Nineteenth Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1920, no. 238.

1999

  • Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1999, no. 44, repro.

  • Around Impressionism: French Paintings from the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999, no cat.

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2011

  • Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 2011, no. 33, repro.

2019

  • Monet: The Late Years, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 2019, no. 3, repro.

Bibliography

1927

  • Regamey, Raymond. "La formation de Claude Monet." Gazette des Beaux-Arts 5e périod, tome15 (February 1927):65-84, repro.

1974

  • Wildenstein, Daniel. Claude Monet. Biographie et catalogue raisonné. 5 vols. Lausanne and Paris, 1974-1991: no. 1517.

1993

  • Swicklik, Michael. "French Painting and the Use of Varnish, 1750-1900." Studies in the History of Art 41 (1993): repro. 156.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 387, no. 321, color repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: Claude Monet / 99

Wikidata ID

Q12858617


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