Le Pont de l’Europe (The Europe Bridge) (1876) depicts the contemporary Parisian life of the last quarter of the XIX century. The location would be easily recognized by Caillebotte’s contemporaries – the large bridge, located above the railroad station Gare Saint Lazare connected six avenues, each of which was named after a different European capital. Caillebotte painted the scene from the view of Rue de Vienne, looking toward the plaza.
The central figures in the composition are a couple strolling along the bridge and a working-class man peering from the bridge looking toward the train station. The man with the female companion is a flâneur – a term that describes an upper class ‘stroller’ or ‘lounger’ that wanders leisurely observing society around him. Scholars have suggested that the flâneur resembles Caillebotte himself, while the female is identified as his friend and model, Anne Marie-Hagen. Caillebotte, who often used his friends as models, painted Hagen on several occasions including La femme à la rose (1884) and Portrait de jeune femme dans un intérieur (Portrait de Mme H) (c. 1877). Photography was an important influence on Caillebotte’s art. In the case of Le Pont de l’Europe, Caillebotte may have modeled the flâneur after a photograph of himself with his dog. In both the painting and the photograph, the man wears a top hat and a double-breasted coat. Several preparatory sketches for Le Pont de l’Europe show that Caillebotte slightly changed the man’s pose. In the photograph, Caillebotte slightly raises his right foot and is more constrained in his movement. In comparison, the man in the painting is confidently striding forward.
The painting is dominated by the structure of the bridge that indicates the modernization of the urban transformation of the city. The bridge, built between 1865 and 1868 was a small component of a sweeping renovation of Paris commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III and directed by his prefect of Seine, Baron Georges Haussmann. The new Parisian landscape of boulevards, crowds, and leisure activities became a popular subject for Impressionist painters. Caillebotte became acquainted with members of the Impressionist movement around 1874, and in 1876 he was invited to participate in the second Impressionist exhibition. In the coming period, he painted several large canvases in which he meticulously emphasized the architectural elements of the urban landscape. At the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, he exhibited three paintings depicting modern life in the new urban landscape: Le Pont de l’Europe, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) and The House Painters (1877).
The source for the composition of Le Pont de l’Europe is the Japanese color woodcut Cotton goods lane, Odenma-cho (c.1857) by Utagawa Hiroshige from his series One hundred famous views of Edo. The two street scenes are different in terms of the subject: Caillebotte’s painting shows the latest achievements in engineering and urban planning, while Hiroshige’s woodcut depicts two geishas walking next to a row of shops in a pre-industrial city. Still, Caillebotte retained the main elements of Hiroshige’s composition: the lines and angles of the bridge are very close to those of the row of shops. In Le Pont de l’Europe, Caillebotte widened the angles, shifting the composition to a horizontal format and adding a background.
