Monet’s river, Derain’s vantage

Look first at what Derain chose to paint, because he chose it on purpose. This is the River Thames in central London, the wide river that runs through the middle of the city. The painting’s title points at a bridge: the Charing Cross Bridge, also called the Hungerford Bridge, a railway bridge that carries trains across the Thames into Charing Cross station on the north bank. (One word of warning, because the alt-titles cause it: the bridge in the picture is the railway bridge. It is not Westminster Bridge, even though some old catalogues loosely call it that.) On the far bank, in the distance, sits Westminster, and you can pick out the clock tower of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, the seat of the British government.

Now the point that makes the whole series make sense: this is, more or less, Monet’s river. The bridge, the barges, the bend of the Thames toward Parliament, these were the same London motifs Monet had painted in his celebrated series. Derain chose similar views and, in some cases, painted from vantage points close to Monet’s own. He was not stumbling onto fresh subject matter. He was walking up to a subject another, older, hugely successful painter had just made famous, and standing in nearly the same spot.

He did not, however, paint most of these on a London riverbank. Like a lot of the series, this kind of canvas was worked up back in France from sketches and drawings made in London, with only some of the group painted in front of the motif. That matters, because it tells you the color was never a transcription of what stood in front of him. A painter back in his French studio, building a London out of sketchbooks and memory, is free to make the river any color he likes, and Derain took that freedom all the way.