A Ponte Ferroviária em Argenteuil

When Monet moved to Argenteuil, a riverside town just outside Paris, at the end of 1871, he became a commuter, riding the train into the city along the very line you see here. In 1873 he painted its bridge. The old stone bridges of France did not look like this. This one is new, iron and blunt, its pale piers marching across the Seine, and a train is crossing it right now, trailing a smudge of white steam. Painters were not supposed to find beauty in a railway. Monet did, and he came back to this bridge again and again, always with a train on it. He made this the year before he and his friends held the first Impressionist exhibition, so the loose, quick handling of the water and the smoke was still a raw, unproven idea. The steam and the summer sky share almost the same brushstroke.