On the Pont de l’Europe

The setting is a real place in the new Paris of the 1870s: the Pont de l'Europe, a broad iron bridge thrown across the rail yards just outside the Gare Saint-Lazare, the city's busiest station. Caillebotte, an engineer's son with money to please himself, was fascinated by its riveted girders and gives them nearly as much attention as the well-dressed strollers and the dog crossing beside them. The whole canvas takes its cool grey-blue from the painted steel. Rather than the crowds and boulevards other Impressionists favoured, he chose the hard geometry of modern engineering. He kept a version of this subject out of the 1877 Impressionist show, reportedly so as not to compete with Monet's own paintings of the very same station.