We look down on a few dozen people walking along the sidewalks of a wide, sunlit bridge in this almost square painting. The scene is loosely painted, which gives it a hazy, sun-dappled look and makes some details indistinct. The people wear black, white, light blue, or pale green jackets and pants or long dresses as they walk in all directions. Some wear hats, and a few women carry parasols. The bridge opens into a wide boulevard close to us, as the sidewalks angle into the lower corners of the composition. Several horse-drawn carriages move across the bridge alongside the people. The deck of the oyster-white bridge is lined with black gas lamps. The river beneath shimmers with lapis and turquoise blue. The far side is packed with four and five-story buildings, which are mostly tan with rows of windows painted as blue rectangles. The rooflines bristle with chimneys. Another structure or boat sits on the water near the lower right corner of the painting, and a flag with vertical bands of red, white, and blue flies from a flagpole there. Opposite the flag, on the far bank, is a statue of a man on a horse, both on a tall plinth. The horizon comes about halfway up the composition, and the azure-blue sky above is dotted with puffy white clouds tinged with dove gray and mauve. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “A. Renoir. 72.”
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While his figure paintings are better known, Renoir's landscapes resonate with a vigor and freshness of vision central to the development of impressionism, most apparent here in his transcription of the effects of sunlight.
Midday sun suffuses the panorama, its intensity heightening the artist's palette and suppressing incidental detail to clarify the crowded scene.
Edmond Renoir, the artist's younger brother and a novice journalist in 1872, later recounted the inception of this painting in an interview. He told how Renoir secured an owner's permission to occupy an upper floor of
a café for one day to depict the view of the famous bridge. Edmond periodically delayed passersby long enough for the artist to record their appearance. Renoir even noted Edmond's presence, walking stick in hand and
straw boater on his head, in two locations.
If, as Edmond indicated, Pont Neuf, Paris was painted during a single day, it was preceded by careful preparations, possibly including preliminary delineation of the permanent architectural features. The painting seems
more richly nuanced and the subject laden with broader meaning than Edmond's anecdote would suggest. Painted in the wake of the Franco–Prussian War and ensuing civil strife that had devastated France in 1870 and 1871,
Renoir's 1872 image shows a representative sampling of French citizenry crossing the oldest bridge in Paris, the intact heart of the recovering country.
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