Pont du Carrousel and the Louvre

Van Gogh had been in Paris only a few months when he painted this in June 1886, living with his brother Theo. The palette is still the one he brought from the Netherlands, greys and dull browns with the light kept low. That same month the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition was closing a short walk away, the one where Seurat showed his Grande Jatte, and within a year Van Gogh's own colour had changed completely. The bridge he set up in front of is not the one standing there today. The Pont du Carrousel of 1834 was an experiment in cast iron, with timber cores inside its arches. It was narrow, and by the 1930s it was judged too low for river traffic. It came down in 1937, and the concrete bridge in its place carries the name now.