The Seine at Pont de Grenelle

The Seine at Pont de Grenelle (1875) at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne is one of Gauguin's earliest Paris river paintings, made when he was learning to paint under Impressionist influence during his stockbroker years. The Pont de Grenelle in the fifteenth arrondissement was one of the Seine bridges close to the working-class neighborhood of Vaugirard where he had been painting, and the river view from the bridge was a classically Impressionist urban subject — water reflections, bridge architecture, the specific quality of Parisian light on the Seine. Pissarro and Monet had both engaged with the Parisian river scene, and Gauguin's version reflected his close study of their example. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which holds this early canvas alongside its major collection of European painting from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, acquired this early Gauguin as documentation of the French Impressionist tradition's formation during the 1870s.

Gauguin renders the river surface with horizontal strokes of blue and gray, the bridge reflected in the water below its physical span. The atmospheric treatment of the Paris sky — diffuse, slightly hazy — is handled with restrained Impressionist brushwork that avoids the drama he would later bring to tropical light.