Claude Monet
(1840 - 1926)
 

Le Pont de bois was painted in 1872, the year that Monet created his famous L’Impression, soleil levant, now in the Musée Marmottan, Paris.

The carefully nuanced pinks, yellows, greys and blues in the water and the sky mark very short-lived, fleeting moments of an evening. They come and go in a matter of minutes. Yet they are recorded with a deftness, rapidity, and sense of authority that is unmistakably the hand of Monet. As a compositional foil, he used the beams and scaffolding surrounding the bridge that was under reconstruction in the months following the Franco-Prussian War. The bridge itself had been destroyed by the French Army as it retreated from the advancing Prussian soldiers who occupied the town of Argenteuil. The scaffolding, bridge and reflections of the architecture in the water anticipate forms and shapes that would later reappear in the art of the twentieth century. One is reminded of Pierre Soulages, Franz Kline, and George Bellows. There are also echoes of bridges depicted in Japanese prints (fig. 2) that we know Monet admired. 

Charles S. Moffett
Vice Chairman, Impressionst, Modern and Contemporary Art, Sotheby's 

LE PONT DE BOIS (The Highway Bridge under repair)
1872
54 x 73 cm
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada
https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/in-the-spotlight/a-new-monet-at-the-national-gallery-of-canada