Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Bridge (1906) belongs to a group of works Derain painted in London, which he visited on three occasions between March 1906 and February 1907. The London paintings were commissioned by Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who took an interest in Derain’s work and even purchased the artist’s entire output in November 1905. At the beginning of the 20th century, Derain and Henri Matisse were the leaders of Fauvism, a groundbreaking artistic movement, which built on the legacy of previous generations of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. Even though Fauvist artists explored similar themes to those of the Impressionists, they were innovative in their approach to color – in their paintings, color was not only a mean of capturing the light and atmosphere, it was a mean for expressing emotions.
Derain was captivated by London, painting a variety of subjects: historical sites like the Palace of Westminster, city’s parks and bustling streets. However, like his predecessors, the Romantic painter J.M.W Turner and the Impressionist Claude Monet, Derain chose to focus on the river, painting many scenes of the banks of the Thames. Matisse encouraged Derain to visit London’s museums and in particularly to see Turner’s paintings. Shortly before his arrival to London, Turner’s unfinished paintings such as The Thames above Waterloo Bridge (ca. 1830-1835) and Norham Castle, Sunrise (ca. 1845) were exhibited for the first time at the Tate Gallery. In terms of color, it indeed seems that Derain’s London scenes were closer to Turner’s Venetian paintings than Monet’s views of London.
Waterloo Bridge depicts the view of the Waterloo Bridge from the Victoria Embankment. It features a blurry view of the Houses of Parliament on the right, and the industrial buildings of the Baltic Wharf on the left side of the painting. However, the focus of the painting is the bright blue bridge that serves as the horizontal line of the composition. Waterloo Bridge embodies the Fauve spirit – Derain used pure colors from the tube to create a bright and colorful vision of London. The application of pure colors on the white canvas relates to the works of Paul Signac and Signac’s approach to color in paintings like Women at the Well (1892). Derain painted Waterloo Bridge in a pointillist technique that he began employing in the summer of 1905, when he was staying with Matisse in Collioure. The dabs of bright greens, blues and purples give the surface the appearance of a mosaic. In comparison to the Collioure painting Mountains at Collioure (1905), the shades of yellow and blue in Waterloo Bridge are cooler, keeping with the London ambience. While shades of blue, green and purple dominate the canvas, Derain creates a burst of the bright yellow and pink sunlight that erupts from the top right corner of the painting. The bright light reflects on the water in the lighter dabs of yellow and green. For Fauvists colors had an expressive function, and Derain described them as “cartridges of dynamite whose purpose is to discharge light”. Waterloo Bridge is part of the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
