El puente de Europa

Caillebotte painted this in 1876, on a bridge that was barely older than he was. The Pont de l'Europe was an iron span thrown across the railway cutting at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, built in the late 1860s as part of Haussmann's rebuilding of the city, its six streets each named for a European capital. He gives the great grey girder pride of place, its riveted lattice running the width of the canvas. A well-dressed man and a woman walk toward us, and a workman in a smock leans over the rail to watch the trains and their steam below. Caillebotte, wealthy enough not to need sales, showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877. It hangs now in the Petit Palais in Geneva.