El puente de Europa

A well-dressed man and a woman in black walk toward us across an iron bridge in Paris, while a workman leans on the railing. Caillebotte's huge street scene of 1876 still keeps people guessing about who is looking at whom.

The story behind the painting

Gustave Caillebotte completed this large canvas, 125 by 181 cm, in 1876. It shows pedestrians on the Place de l'Europe in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, a vast bridge that joins six avenues, each named after a European capital, above the railway yards of the Gare Saint-Lazare. The view is taken from the rue de Vienne, looking toward the centre of the plaza. Caillebotte showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, next to his Paris Street, Rainy Day and to Claude Monet's own view of the same bridge from the station.

What to look for

One of the bridge's iron trusses is huge in the picture and fills half of the image. In the foreground a couple walks toward the viewer, and a working-class man leans on the railing, peering toward the station. A dog trots away from us, and other figures appear further back. Then look for the vanishing point: it lies behind the head of the man in the couple, far to the side of the picture, which creates a strong oblique perspective. Wikipedia notes the influence of Japanese art, especially Hiroshige, and of photography, then a young art.

Meaning and intent

The man in the couple is a flâneur, an upper-class observer of the street, walking with a woman dressed in black. She has often been read as a prostitute, given the norms of the time about women in public near the station. Others have thought the pair are Caillebotte himself and his companion Anne-Marie Hagen. The flâneur looks past the woman toward the workman. The feminist art historian Norma Broude suggested that Caillebotte, a lifelong bachelor, was signalling his own homosexuality through this gaze, though his orientation is not definitively known. The sources leave all these readings open.

Legacy

Today the painting belongs to the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva, Switzerland. Its daring perspective and its tension between classes did not stay in the nineteenth century. Wikipedia suggests that it may have influenced the photographer Jeff Wall, whose 1982 work Mimic shows three figures placed in a similar way, with the same exaggerated perspective and the same uneasy meeting of social classes. More than a century apart, a painter and a photographer used one city street to ask the same quiet question about who watches and who is watched.