The Argenteuil Bridge and the Seine

The bridge at Argenteuil was wrecked during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 and then rebuilt, its heavy cast-iron arches carried once more across the Seine. A decade later it was a piece of modern engineering that painters kept returning to. Claude Monet had shown it in 1874 from the side, with sailboats in front. Caillebotte, around 1883, went underneath. He took just one of its seven arches and let it fill the top of the canvas, leaving out the stone pier on the right, so the iron seems to hang over the water with nothing to hold it up. The sky shrinks to a thin blue strip behind the railing. Through the arch sit the town and the green hill of Orgemont, with a factory chimney among the houses. Up on the bridge, a single figure stands at the rail.