Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil

In 1887 or 1888 a Philadelphia lawyer, John G. Johnson, bought this canvas. Johnson argued cases for some of the largest companies in America, the Pennsylvania Railroad and Standard Oil among them, and he collected paintings with the same appetite, well over 1,300 by the time he died in 1917.

What he bought was Monet's own neighbourhood. Argenteuil, a town on the Seine a short train ride from Paris, was where the painter was living, and the iron railway bridge here was newly built. Monet stood low on the bank, so the pale piers line up across the water while a train runs along the top and one sailboat goes by underneath. The museum points out that signs of industry like this almost disappear from his later landscapes. Johnson left his whole collection to the City of Philadelphia, and the pictures began arriving at the museum in 1930.