Gustave Caillebotte's *Le Pont de l'Europe* was exhibited at the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877, along with two other large city scenes, *Paris Street; Rainy Day* (Art Institute of Chicago) and *The House-Painters* (private collection). Together, the subject matter of these works—everyday activities on the boulevards of Paris—marked the artist as what Charles Baudelaire would have described as a "painter of modern life." In *Le Pont de l'Europe*, Caillebotte presents us with a wide-angle view of a sidewalk on one of the technological marvels of Paris. Built between 1805 and 1868 at the convergence of six major boulevards, the bridge straddled the tracks of one of the city's major train stations, the Gare St.-Lazare. Caillebotte may have chosen the site because he lived nearby. In this painting, Caillebotte also documented several of the modern inhabitants of Paris. On the right, an artisan rests on the bridge's handrail and, to the left, the artist depicted one of the archetypal denizens of modern city life, the "man of the crowd" or *flâneur* (the detached observer of urban life), who strides past a fashionably dressed woman strolling with a parasol. Scholars have noted that the carefully constructed exchange of glances between these characters suggests that Caillebotte intended this painting to be seen not only as a visual document but also as a social allegory.

*Le Pont de l'Europe* is an ambitious painting that required extensive preparation. Caillebotte made meticulous perspective studies as well as preliminary drawings of each of the various individuals depicted in this scene. The result is a carefully rendered and complex composition. Émile Zola, the great realist writer and early supporter of the Impressionists, was so taken by the "beautiful truth" (*belle vérité*) he discerned in the works Caillebotte exhibited in 1877 that he wrote, "When his talent becomes a little more broken in, M. Caillebotte will certainly be one of the boldest of the group."

In the fifty years or so immediately following his death in 1894, Caillebotte was best known for the magnificent collection of Impressionist pictures that he bequeathed to the French State. His own paintings suffered from decades of neglect, only beginning to attract public recognition in the 1950s as a result of a rethinking of Impressionism and the greater availability of pictures that had remained in the hands of the artist's descendants. How *Le Pont de l'Europe* entered the collection of the Petit Palais in Geneva is typical of the way in which Caillebotte's paintings have come into public view. The painting was initially given by the artist to Eugène Lamy, who then bequeathed it to his daughter. In 1956, it appeared for sale in the Charpentier gallery in Paris, from which it was acquired by the perceptive Swiss collector Oscar Ghez. In 1968, the Ghez collection opened in Geneva under the title of the Petit Palais, where *Le Pont de l'Europe* has since become one of the museum's major attractions.