The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil

Three years before Monet set up his easel here, this bridge was rubble. Retreating French troops had blown up the crossings at Argenteuil in 1870 to slow the Prussian advance, and the town spent the early 1870s rebuilding. What Monet painted in 1874 is the brand-new replacement, a bridge of iron on pale concrete piers, with a train trailing white steam as it crosses the Seine. He turns the fresh concrete supports into something like sunlit marble columns, mirrored in the moving water. A painter of an older school would have kept a railway out of a river view. Monet set it near the centre, a piece of new machinery dropped into a scene of Sunday calm, and made the steam and the light on the water the thing he really cared about.