On the Pont de l'Europe (1899): Art, History and Details

On the Pont de l'Europe (1899) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Pont de l’Europe, a massive iron bridge built between 1865 and 1869, provided easy access to the expanded Gare Saint-Lazare railway station. Vuillard depicts this quintessential symbol of Parisian modernity with a decorative design of crisscrossing railings. The pattern is reminiscent of the wallpaper and textiles in the artist’s paintings of interiors throughout the 1890s, such as those on view in the first two galleries of this exhibition. In his own witty and highly personal manner, Vuillard domesticized one of the capital’s most important landmarks and technologically modern feats.

Object facts

• Title: On the Pont de l'Europe
• Date: 1899
• Creator attribution: Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: color lithograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 33.4 x 49.5 cm (13 1/8 x 19 1/2 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1951.65.10

A detail from the museum

A popular scene among French Impressionists, Le Pont de l’Europe is also depicted in paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Brown, Heather Lemonedes. “The Nabi City.” In Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900. Mary Weaver Chapin and Heather Lemonedes Brown, 222-261. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.