Juan Manuel Moreno
Walking on Charing Cross Bridge
Located under the stairs to the lower floor, still in the area reserved to the collection of the Baroness. I am going to see the paintings of the Impressionists: they are wonderful. According to some I had to stop at "Charing Cross Bridge" by Claude Orayan Monet. Son of a grocery shop keeper, he was born in 1840 in Paris and at 15 he entered the artists' world as a caricaturist, he would turn to a more realist style afterwards. But it was from 1860 onwards that he starts to paint works of a very marked Impressionist style. He actually paints the painting called "Impression, rising sun" during his stay in the harbor of Le Havre, giving the name to the painting movement corresponding.
Great traveler this Monet: he goes over the entire country of France, Normandy, Brittany, the Mediterranean coast, does his military service in Algeria, from where he comes back one year later as a consequence of the typhoid fevers, he crosses the English Channel, arrives in London, where he takes refuge as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war, gets to know the Netherlands, Norway, Italy and we can even find him in Madrid where he studies the Spanish masters.
But I will try to have a walk through "The Bridge of Charing Cross". It is a random sunset in London in the years between 1899 and 1901. The atmosphere is foggy, unpleasant, possibly cold.
Some boats cleave the Thames river under my feet and in the background we can see the Parliament.
It reminds me of Turner. During one of my trips to London, I could observe a similar image but I would never have thought about painting what I saw, or better said, what I could not see, what I was simply sensing. This is the really surprising aspect of the painting.
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