Le Ponte de L’Europe (1876)
by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894)
Le Ponte de L’Europe, by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte represents a remarkable innovation in modernist art. Notice how distinctly cinematic this image looks? That’s because he chose to paint it in an ultra-wide format, resembling what we would today call a ‘wide-screen’ image.
He actually painted a more impressionistic sketch of the same scene, but with a more compressed focal point. See the difference? (Ps: the dog is also missing…)
Side by side these images demonstrate the way in which Caillebotte was using the impressionistic style to reinvent what realism could be. One of the criticisms the impressionists had of the realist style was that it often represented idealized scenes rather than real life. But here we can see how Caillebotte uses a hyper-real style to give us a scene that looks like it could have been taken with a photo-camera.
The use of perspective is also interesting. Caillebotte was inspired by the urban scenes of the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (see below).
One could also make the argument that Caillebotte’s painting functions as an allegory. We see modern Parisians quite literally walking into the future. Behind them lies the quintessentially Parisian city-scape, ahead of them lies a new, as of yet unseen world. Indeed the emphasis on the steel beams of the bridge makes this a modern image in and of itself. It is as if Caillebotte were merging his artistic vision of the future (his “impression”) with his realist depiction of the changing city around around him. It’s a wonderful painting, and to my mind one of his very best.
Fun fact: This painting was considered slightly scandalous, as some people thought the woman walking next to the man might be a so-called demi-monde. But who knows…
Julian
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