Claude Monet was sixty years old when he first visited London specifically to paint it. He had been there before, decades earlier. This time he came with a particular project in mind: capturing the Thames in the industrial fog that made London's atmosphere unlike anything on the Continent. He produced nearly a hundred paintings of the river during three visits, most of them from the same window at the Savoy Hotel looking out at Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge.
The fog was the point. Monet was interested in the way light moved through atmosphere — not clear air, but the heavy particulate fog of Victorian London, full of coal smoke and river mist. He would work on multiple canvases simultaneously, moving between them as the light shifted, returning to each one when the conditions matched the state he had left it in. The paintings are serial documents of a single visual problem across different times of day and different weather conditions.
The Thames below Westminster appears in this series: the riverbank, the fog, the suggestion of the old bridge and the Parliament buildings barely visible through haze. What's in focus is the water and the light on it. What's obscured is everything that would tell you where you are, what time it is, who else is on the riverbank.
The WRPSA art series finds something instructive in the obscured visibility. Rock Paper Scissors is fundamentally an information game played under opacity. You know your own throw. You cannot see your opponent's until the reveal. The whole competitive skill is inferring what you can't see from what you can observe about timing, pattern, and physical behavior. Monet's Thames is the visual equivalent of that problem: enough visible to orient you, enough hidden to keep you uncertain. The correct play is to focus on what you can observe and commit cleanly to your read.
The painting is in the National Gallery in London, which is relevant proximity to the bridge it depicts.