Le Pont de l'Europe

The story of Le Pont de l'Europe

A man in a top hat strides across an iron bridge with a woman a step behind him, a dog trots ahead, and a workman in a smock leans on the rail to watch the trains below. The bridge's girders take up half the picture in a lattice of gray-green steel. Caillebotte painted it in 1876, the year he first showed with the Impressionists, and it hangs in the Petit Palais in Geneva. It is a painting about the new city: iron, steam, perspective lines that rush away from you, and people who do not look at each other.

On a wall, Le Pont de l'Europe is cool and architectural. The dominant colors are slate gray, steel green, pale blue sky, and the black of the figures' coats, with a few warm notes in the stone and the dog. It suits a home office, a hallway, a loft, an entryway, or a den, and it fits industrial, modern, mid-century, and city-apartment interiors, especially with black metal and concrete. Our source image supports the Mini at 12 × 8 in, so treat it as a close-up print: above a desk, beside a door, or as one panel in a wall of Paris scenes where its perspective pulls the eye.

Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day is the same year's other great view of the new boulevards, and The Floor Scrapers is his other painting of modern work. Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare shows the station whose steam is rising under this bridge. More from Gustave Caillebotte.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Geneva canvas, with the cool grays kept true rather than warmed up.