The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (detail)

What you are looking at

This image is a close-up of the left part of one of Claude Monet's views of the railway bridge at Argenteuil. Two men stand on the riverbank at lower left, seen from behind: one in a dark jacket and trousers with a yellow straw hat, the other in a lighter grey-blue suit and a cap. They look out at the river, where a small sailboat with a pale grey-lilac sail and a warm yellow hull glides on blue water.

Above them the bridge runs straight across the picture: a flat girder deck painted in white and pale grey, its side divided by thin vertical lines, resting on massive cylindrical piers. On top of the deck, the dark shapes of a train's carriages and the funnel of its engine are just visible. Through and beneath the bridge we see the green far bank with a row of poplars, a glimpse of lattice girders at right, and above everything a blue sky heaped with white and lilac cumulus.

The whole painting, dated 1873 and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 279, is a wide canvas of about 60 by 99 centimeters. It shows the bridge running almost parallel to the picture plane across the full width, with the train and its steam above the river. It is in a private collection, which is why it is far less familiar than the version in the Musée d'Orsay.

Where and when

Monet lived at Argenteuil, on the Seine about 11 kilometers northwest of Paris, from December 1871 to early 1878. The railway line from the Gare Saint-Lazare crossed the river there on an iron bridge, rebuilt after its destruction in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. It brought Sunday crowds of Parisians to sail, row and walk on the banks, and Monet painted it repeatedly in 1873 and 1874. See Monet at Argenteuil.

1873 was a good year for him. Durand-Ruel was buying his work, the family was comfortable for once, and he was planning, with Pissarro, Degas, Renoir and others, the independent exhibition that opened in April 1874.

How it was painted

The detail lets you see how economical Monet's figures are. Each man is a handful of strokes: a dark body, a patch of light for a face turned away, a flick of yellow for the straw hat. The sailboat is a triangle of grey-white with a single dark line for its edge and a warm yellow stroke for the hull. Yet together they tell a story: people of leisure watching the river, the modern world passing over their heads.

Notice the bridge's color. Monet paints its side in bright white and pale grey, catching the sun, so the iron looks almost weightless against the sky. The piers are cool lilac-grey, modeled with a lighter stripe on their sunlit side, and their reflections fall straight down into the water in long, pale strokes. The clouds are thick, creamy and rounded, a contrast with the ruled straightness of the deck.

The motif and its siblings

Monet painted the Argenteuil railway bridge several times, and the versions are easily confused. In the Musée d'Orsay painting, the bridge cuts diagonally across the canvas from a bushy bank at the right, and there are no figures. In this 1873 version the bridge is seen side-on, the foreground is an open bank with a path, and the two spectators make the scene a modern Sunday outing. Other versions are Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil in Philadelphia and The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge in Saint Louis. For the town's road bridge, see The Bridge at Argenteuil; for the sailing that drew the crowds, Regatta at Argenteuil.

Where to see it

The painting is privately owned and rarely exhibited. It sold at Christie's in New York on 6 May 2008 for about 41.5 million dollars, at the time a record price for a work by Monet; the record was broken a few weeks later. For Monet paintings on public view, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.