Gustave Caillebotte: Le Pont de l’Europe, esquisse (1876)

The painting depicts one of the engineering marvels of Caillebotte’s day, an immense bridge spanning the rail yards of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Two men gaze through the massive iron trellises of the bridge toward the depot, the roof of which is glimpsed between the X-shaped girders at the right. Rather than cloaking the latticework of the bridge in vapor, as Monet did in his contemporaneous views of the station, Caillebotte audaciously exploited its unembellished geometry—the embodiment of brute industrial architecture—to organize his composition. The structural elements of the Le Pont de l’Europe, esquisse, flattened against the plane of the canvas and cut off by its edges, press the figures into the very foreground, inviting the viewer to…