On the Pont de l'Europe

Gustave Caillebotte, the master of urban intimacy, was born on this day in 1848. Caillebotte painted The Pont de l'Europe several times, but this is a favorite. The bridge overlooks the Saint-Lazare train station, which was famously portrayed by Monet in a dozen paintings made early in 1877. Caillebotte, the painter, but also an art collector and important patron to other Impressionists, purchased three of Monet’s variations on the station theme. Caillebotte was close to Monet and Renoir, the key advocates for loose brushwork and bright color, but he preferred the sort of conventional draftsmanship and unaffected urban subjects dear to their fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas. Like Degas, he limited himself to strictly subdued visual means, and the painting, On the Pont de l’Europe, is virtually monochromatic with the pervasive blue tones corresponding in visual terms to the chilling cold in which the figures stand. The man on the left with his collar turned up and the principal figure, both with their backs turned toward each other are dressed in identical fashion. For his composition, Caillebotte adopted the geometric structure of the bridge, one pier of which bisects his picture vertically into two arched bays and these bays each subdivided by diagonal cross-bracing struts. The humanity of the figures resides in their freedom to escape the rigid symmetry.