The Bridge at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

The road bridge at Argenteuil crosses the whole width of the canvas: two heavy stone piers, pale cream in the sun, carry a run of dark iron arches with a latticed parapet. Along the top, tiny figures in white and red walk across the deck against the sky. Beneath the bridge, sailboats lie at anchor with their sails furled, their bare masts rising through the arches and above the parapet. A dark covered boat sits in the middle of the river, and in the foreground a white dinghy floats on water that breaks into strokes of blue, violet and grey.

Through the arches we see the far bank: a low green hill, a few houses, and at right the line of another bridge. Above everything is a lively sky of grey-white cloud, with patches of blue. A strip of green bank runs along the bottom edge, and the signature and date, "Claude Monet 1874," are at lower right.

Claude Monet painted this view in 1874, when he was living in Argenteuil. The canvas measures about 60 by 81 centimeters, is number 313 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which show it at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

Where and when

Argenteuil lies on the Seine about 11 kilometers northwest of Paris. Monet lived there from December 1871 to early 1878, and the river, with its boats and two bridges, was his main subject. See Monet at Argenteuil.

The road bridge had been destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and was rebuilt soon after. When Monet arrived it was still under repair, and in 1872 he painted it with timber scaffolding around a pier. By 1874 it was whole again, and he painted it repeatedly that year, from different points along the bank and from the floating studio boat he had fitted out. The bridge became one of his signature motifs, an emblem of a town recovering from war and of the engineering that linked it to Paris. That spring Monet also helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition; 1874 was perhaps the most productive year of his time at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

This composition is frontal and nearly symmetrical, unlike the better-known versions in the Musée d'Orsay and in Washington, where the bridge slants in from the right. The result is a grid: the horizontal deck, the vertical piers and the vertical masts. Monet softens it with the water. Look at the reflections of the piers, long broken strokes of cream and ochre that wobble down into the river, and at the masts, whose reflections zigzag back toward us.

The light falls from the left, so the near face of each pier is in shade and its side catches the sun. Monet uses that contrast to give the stone weight, while the iron arches above are painted thinly, almost as drawing, in dark blue-grey. The grass at the bottom is scrubbed in with loose, upright strokes of green, the roughest handling in the picture, and the white dinghy is a few thick, creamy touches that pull the foreground forward.

The motif and its siblings

The road bridge appears in at least half a dozen of Monet's canvases. Compare The Road Bridge at Argenteuil in Washington, seen at a sharp angle with a sailboat in full sun, and Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat in Dublin. The town's other bridge, carrying the railway from Paris, is the subject of The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil. The Munich picture is the most architectural of the group, closest to a straight portrait of the bridge.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Bavarian State Painting Collections and is shown at the Neue Pinakothek, Munich. The Neue Pinakothek building has been closed for renovation since 2019, and a selection of its paintings has been shown in the Alte Pinakothek and elsewhere in the meantime, so check the collection's website before a visit. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.