Gustave Caillebotte
Caillebotte painted Le Pont de l'Europe in 1876 from the bridge itself, looking along the iron girders over the Saint-Lazare railyards.
Pont de l'Europe
Rebuilt on the site
Walk straight in
Still the same
The iron bridge carrying six streets across the tracks behind Gare Saint-Lazare — the subject of Gustave Caillebotte's 1876 painting, and the spot where Impressionism looked hardest at industrial Paris.
- place de l'Europe – Simone Veil, 75008 Paris
- Built in the 1860s over the Saint-Lazare railyards
The place, briefly
The Pont de l'Europe was built in the 1860s to carry a six-way junction of new streets across the enormous cutting of railway lines running out of Gare Saint-Lazare. It was a piece of engineering treated as a piece of city, and it fascinated the painters of the quarter.
Gustave Caillebotte's 1876 canvas puts the viewer on the bridge itself: the great trellis of iron girders running away at a steep diagonal, a couple walking, a workman leaning on the parapet looking down at the steam. The perspective is aggressive, almost photographic, and the girders take up as much of the picture as the people do.
The bridge is a hinge in the story of Impressionism. Édouard Manet painted the same railway cutting from beside it. A year after Caillebotte's picture, Claude Monet took his easel into the station below and produced the twelve canvases that begin his series method. Three painters, one small patch of the 8th arrondissement, inside two years.
The iron Caillebotte painted has since been replaced. The crossing is still there, the tracks are still below it, and the view down onto the throat of the station is much as it was.
Key facts
- An iron bridge carrying a six-way junction over the Saint-Lazare railyards
- Le Pont de l'Europe, 1876
- Place de l'Europe – Simone Veil
- Monet's twelve Gare Saint-Lazare canvases, painted in the station below
- Public — walk across it
Timeline
The bridge is built over the railway cutting behind Gare Saint-Lazare.
Caillebotte paints Le Pont de l'Europe.
Monet paints the Gare Saint-Lazare series in the station beneath it.
On the map
Questions before you go
Can you still walk on the Pont de l'Europe?
Yes. The crossing at the place de l'Europe – Simone Veil is public, and the view down over the tracks into Gare Saint-Lazare remains.
Is it the original bridge?
Not the original ironwork, which was replaced in the twentieth century. The crossing, the geometry and the setting are the same.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg
Manet's studio through the 1870s, whose windows looked down on what was then the rue Mosnier — the street he painted repeatedly, flags and all, in the summer of 1878.
Visit the placePlace de Dublin
The star-shaped junction in the Quartier de l'Europe where Gustave Caillebotte set Paris Street; Rainy Day — and one of the few places in Paris where you can stand almost exactly where a famous painting was composed and recognise everything.
Visit the place42 rue de Londres
One of Claude Debussy's documented Paris homes, and his address until around 1894 — the years in which he wrote the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and began Pelléas et Mélisande.
Visit the place
Gare Saint-Lazare
Paris's oldest terminus — Claude Monet's steam-filled train shed, the boat trains to the Atlantic liners, and the platform where the Paris chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night end in pistol shots.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.