The Railway Bridge, Pontoise

Pissarro painted this in 1873, the year before he and his friends put on the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris and got themselves mocked in the press. He was living in Pontoise, a town on the river Oise northwest of the city, and over nearly two decades there he made hundreds of pictures of its fields and water. What catches the eye here is the iron railway bridge, built in 1860, cutting across the river. Many painters kept trains and their bridges out of a landscape; Pissarro let this new, functional thing sit plainly in the middle of the view. Of all the canvases he made at Pontoise, this is the only one in which he painted that bridge.