Charing Cross Bridge, London

A London the eye never saw, the Thames running pink and the sky burning butter-yellow, painted by a 26-year-old whom a dealer had shipped to England on purpose to beat Monet at his own river.

1. 1
   The bridge that names the painting

   The long horizontal band crossing the middle of the canvas, river below, far bank beyond

   The structure spanning the river is the Charing Cross / Hungerford railway bridge, the painting’s namesake (which is why the picture is also catalogued as “Hungerford Bridge at Charing Cross”). Derain draws it not as modeled iron but as a flattened band laid across the canvas, the architecture asserted rather than described. Note what it is NOT: this is the railway bridge, not Westminster Bridge, and the building you can pick out beyond it is on the far bank, a separate thing entirely.
2. 2
   A river with no blue in it

   The broad lower band of water beneath the bridge

   The Thames is built from short broken horizontal strokes and separate dots, mostly bumblebee yellow shot through with bubblegum pink and pale burnt-orange, much of it laid straight over bare off-white canvas. There is no blue and no gray anywhere in the water. This is the single fact that tells you what kind of painting you are in: a river that exists only in paint, not a river anyone ever looked at and saw.
3. 3
   A sky that replaced the weather

   The whole upper band, above the far bank

   London’s famous gray is gone outright. The sky is built from short and long vertical strokes of butter yellow, rose pink, pale orange, and patches of watermelon pink, a warm glow stretched across the top of the picture. It is the clearest sign that this is sensation set down, not weather recorded. Hold this against Monet’s London, where the whole subject is the fog and the changing light; here there is no fog and no hour of the day, only color.
4. 4
   The dark barges that fix the scale

   On the water, in the mid- and foreground

   Small river craft and barges sit on the colored water (the museum tags the picture “Boats”). They read as dark accents against the pink-and-yellow river, and they do quiet work: they give the bridge its size and tell you this glowing field is a working Thames, a real river of commerce, not an abstract pattern. They are the human, ordinary note inside the unnatural color.
5. 5
   Big Ben, the one thing that says “London”

   The far bank, behind and beyond the bridge

   The riverfront bends away toward Westminster, and among the massed buildings on the far bank you can pick out Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. They are the single anchor that tells you this is London at all, and Derain paints them glowing orange and turquoise rather than stone-gray. Everything else is color set free; this one landmark is the leash that keeps the picture tied to a real place.
6. 6
   Two touches at once: the dot and the patch

   Compare the broken, dotted water and sky against the broader flat color areas

   Derain mixes two ways of laying down paint. In the water and sky he uses separate spots and lines of pure color, a loosened version of the Neo-Impressionist “divisionism” of Seurat and Signac (small dots of unmixed color meant to blend in the viewer’s eye). Elsewhere he drops that for flatter, broader Fauve patches. In his hands the strict divisionist dot relaxes into intermittent spots and dashes, so the surface flickers between two methods, structure and shimmer at the same time.