The Bridge at Bougival

What you are looking at

A broad, sandy road runs from the foreground toward the right, where it becomes the bridge over the Seine, its white parapet and an arched gateway pillar catching the light. Along the left side of the road stands a row of slim trees with thinning brown leaves, and their shadows fall across the surface in long bands of blue-violet. A few people are out: a woman in a long dress with a small child by the trees, men in dark coats walking onto the bridge, a cart at the far end.

On the left, beyond a low bank, a strip of river glints silver-grey, and across it the village climbs a wooded hill, white houses and red roofs set among green and brown. Over it all moves a big, unsettled sky of charcoal-grey and white cloud, with patches of blue. The light comes and goes: the road is sunny in the middle distance, shadowed near us.

Claude Monet painted the scene at Bougival, on the Seine west of Paris, in 1869. The canvas measures 65 by 92 centimeters, is number 152 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and has belonged to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, since 1949.

Where and when

Monet spent much of 1869 at Saint-Michel, a hamlet on the hillside above Bougival, with Camille Doncieux and their two-year-old son Jean. They were desperately poor; that summer he wrote to Frédéric Bazille that they had no bread and no fuel. Yet it was a crucial year. Just upriver, at Croissy, was La Grenouillère, the floating café and bathing place where he and Renoir painted side by side that summer, developing the broken, flickering brushwork that became Impressionism.

The bridge picture applies the same discoveries to a quieter subject: an ordinary road on the edge of Paris, where the city met the countryside and Sunday visitors came out by train. The bridge here crossed from Bougival toward the island of Croissy and the far bank.

How it was painted

The composition is built on a strong diagonal. The road and the bridge parapet run from the foreground toward the far right, while the trees make a row of verticals that slows the movement. Look at the shadows on the road. They are not grey or brown but blue-violet, laid in long horizontal bands that alternate with strips of warm, sunlit sand. That colored shadow is one of the first clear signs of what Monet was working toward.

The sky is painted with real energy, in short, thick strokes of white and charcoal grey, with blue between them, and its weather is matched on the ground, where light and shade alternate along the road. The figures are a few dabs each, a dark coat, a white bonnet, placed to give scale rather than to tell a story. The leaves on the trees are single touches of brown and ochre, scattered loosely against the clouds.

This is a big canvas for an outdoor picture, and its finish is broad and even. It may have been begun in front of the motif and finished in the studio, as Monet often did with his larger works at this date.

The motif and its siblings

Bougival and the nearby river towns were painted by almost every Impressionist. Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro worked on the same stretch of the Seine around 1869–72, and Renoir returned for his Dance at Bougival in 1883. From Monet's own year there come La Grenouillère and the close-up of moored boats in The Boats; that winter he also painted the snowy road at nearby Louveciennes. Earlier, in 1867, he had painted ice on the river here in Ice Floes at Bougival. For Monet, Bougival was a rehearsal for Argenteuil, where he moved at the end of 1871 and painted the bridges again in pictures such as The Bridge at Argenteuil.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, where it is the best-known work in the collection; it is sometimes lent to exhibitions. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.