ポン・ヌフ

Monet painted the Pont Neuf on a wet grey day in 1873, looking down on it from a window above. Paris was only two years past a brutal stretch, defeat by Prussia and then the bloody collapse of the Commune, and the city was busy proving it was alive again. That is what he catches, not the old stone bridge itself so much as the crush of movement over it, carriages, top hats, and a scatter of umbrellas smeared through the rain in quick, loose strokes. The following year he would show work in the exhibition where a mocking critic coined the word Impressionist. Here the paint is already thin and rapid, weather caught rather than described.