Waterloo Bridge

An arched bridge emerges like a ghost from a cotton candy-like pink and lavender mist.

A fantastical scene of London's River Thames, enveloped in thick smog from the Industrial Revolution.

But in fact, when this painting was completed, the painter Monet was confronting the limitations of Impressionism, which aimed to 'capture a fleeting moment,' and was in the midst of endless revisions.

In 1899, he began painting this scene from the balcony of the Savoy Hotel.

However, he was at the mercy of London's ever-changing, capricious fog and light, and was forced into a grueling struggle, arranging dozens of canvases simultaneously and switching between them.

Eventually, he gave up on completing the paintings on site (en plein air) and took all the works back to his studio in Giverny, France.

He then refused to hand them over to art dealers, stating that he 'could not complete them unless all the works were in front of him,' and immersed himself in endless additions and revisions for years, relying on his memory to harmonize the entire series.

The scene he depicted after his struggle in the solitary studio, far from being submerged in heavy pollution smoke, shines with surprisingly delicate and romantic pastel colors and is filled with mystical beauty.

What saved him was perhaps not just the real landscape before his eyes, but 'light and atmosphere' itself, idealized in his own memory and radiating an eternal glow through the veil of fog.