Claude Monet - The Pont Neuf 1872

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Claude Monet - The Pont Neuf 1872

The Pont Neuf 1872
53x73cm oil/canvas
Dallas Museum of Art
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes

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From Dallas Museum of Art:
Claude Monet returned to Paris in the fall of 1871 after more than a year of exile in England and Holland. He found a city ravaged from without by the Franco-Prussian War and from within by the Commune. Although his sympathies were with the Communards in the latter struggle, he arrived after they had been violently suppressed by the national government, and he found a city in deep despair. He painted only one work during that time, "The Pont Neuf," and it can be contrasted in every way with the series of Parisian cityscapes that he made in 1866 and 1867, before the debacles that so wounded the French capital. Where the earlier paintings were made from the balconies and windows of the Louvre, looking out on a city alive with movement and color on sunny summer days, the Reves painting is essentially a grisaille study of inclement weather, probably painted from a rented room or the apartment of a friend. Gone are the monuments of Paris - the dome of the Panthéon or the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois - that center his earlier paintings. The small houses of the famous place Dauphine are scarcely more important than the anonymous apartments across the river. Monet's intent is even clearer when we compare his work with Renoir's painting of the same bridge. [see "Pont Neuf, Paris, 1872." National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.] For Renoir, all sparkles in the sun; shadows give form to the figures as they bustle over the bridge.