Renoir's Pont Neuf

Auguste Renoir’s originality as a landscape painter helped define impressionism. In paintings like this one, he transcribed immediate and ephemeral sensory effects. The pavement is yellow with light, brighter even than the sky. Its glare washes out incidental detail so that we almost squint at dark, backlit forms. Shadows fall in cool violet tones, complements of the yellow light.

Among the brisk crowd, one man, wearing a straw boater and carrying the cane of a fashionable boulevardier, appears twice: he is Renoir’s younger brother Edmond, at the time an aspiring journalist. In the lower center, he angles toward us while consulting a book, and walks away at the far left. Many years later Edmond described how he and Renoir shared ten-centime coffees above a café on the Right Bank, overlooking the bridge. As the artist painted the busy activity below, he would dispatch his brother to delay some figures with idle questions and chatter while he brushed in their forms.

When Renoir painted pont Neuf, life was just returning to normal in Paris. The city had been besieged and the country
defeated in the Franco-Prussian War; war wounds and the ensuing violence of the Commune were still raw. Although many parts of the city remained devastated, Renoir emphasized a rebounding vitality. Crossing the bridge are soldiers and dandies, laborers and pampered young ladies: the renewed life of the city.

Jean Renoir, Le Pont Neuf (1872)