The Pont des Arts, Paris

In 1867 Paris was crowded with visitors. The city was hosting the Exposition Universelle, a vast world's fair meant to show off French industry and taste, and Renoir, then in his mid-twenties and years before anyone called him an Impressionist, went down to the riverbank to paint the traffic of it. From the Left Bank he looked upstream at the iron Pont des Arts and filled the quay with the whole street: ladies in bright crinolines, dandies, soldiers in crimson trousers, urchins and stray dogs, a workman in a blue smock resting by the water. Up the ramp, secondhand booksellers trade under the dome of the Institut de France. The shadows fall hard and the blacks are heavy here, the mark of an early Renoir who had not yet lightened his palette for open daylight.