Renoir’s Le Pont Neuf

Everyday life in Paris in the wake of chaos

By Philip McCouat                                 For reader comments on this article, see here 

Fig 1: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Pont Neuf (1872), oil on canvas, 75 x 94 cm (29 x 37 in), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Renoir’s painting of the busy Pont Neuf bridge in Paris radiates normality and sunniness. But you would never guess that just a year before this peaceable scene was painted, Paris had been a bloodied battlefield, with many thousands of people being slaughtered in the streets. In recent times, the city had been ravaged by France’s disastrous war with Prussia, the near starvation of many of the city’s residents, the de facto seizure of power by radically-minded revolutionaries, and the extraordinary violence of the national government’s forcible return to power.

In this article we’ll be examining Renoir’s painting in the light of all these events. But first, let’s look at the significance of the bridge itself.

A bridge that is both old and new

The Pont Neuf, or “New Bridge”, has a long and proud history. It was constructed back in 1577-1603 to unite the banks of the River Seine which runs through Paris. It still stands, due partly to its being constructed of stone and, despite its name, it is now actually Paris’s oldest bridge.

Unusually for its time, it was quite wide and had pavements for pedestrians, and although it had shops in the semi-circular benched lunettes that protrude over the river [1], it was not used for residential premises. In fact, the late decision not to include these premises partly accounts for its wideness. Due to its strategic position, it became a major traffic artery and centre of commerce in the heart of old Paris [2].

The bridge was substantially renovated in the 1850s, the early years of the Haussmann era, by the removal of the shops. The distinctive street gas lampposts were added and the pavement extended.

A popular subject for the Impressionists

Renoir painted the scene from an elevated viewpoint, sitting in a room on an upper storey of a wine merchant’s premises in the Rue de la Monnaie, which he rented for the occasion [3]. He evidently shared the room with his Impressionist painting buddy Claude Monet [4], who also painted the scene from the same viewpoint, though on a quite different, rainy day (Fig 4). 

The bridge was also a magnet for other Impressionist artists, with Camille Pissarro painting an extraordinary series of twelve versions.

The elevated bird’s eye approach adopted by all three of these painters also appeared in various photographic postcards or topological prints that were circulating at the time. It had also been previously adopted by these artists for other scenes -- for example, Monet’s Garden of the Princess (1867) [5]; Renoir’s Champs Elysées During the Fair of 1867 (1867); and Pissarro’s Jalais Hill, Pontoise (1867). 

Vibrant street life and a multitude of characters 

Renoir’s painting depicts a bright sunny day, with fluffy white clouds in a brilliant blue sky. We are looking south, across the Seine, to the tip of the Isle de la Cité – the island in the Seine -- where there is a statue of Henri IV astride a horse (the first equestrian statue in Paris), and beyond that to the buildings on the Left Bank. 

Rather than its architecture, however, Renoir’s main interest is the activities and people on the bridge -- the strollers, flirters, loungers, officials, workers, street sellers, children, dogs and the various horse-drawn vehicles.

According to his brother Edmond [6], Renoir would sit in his rented upper-storey room watching the activities on the bridge for hours. The story goes that as this scene was so ever-changing, he asked Edmond to go down regularly and strike up conversations with people on the bridge, which enabled Renoir to have time to sketch them properly [7]. And indeed, much of the appeal of the painting lies in those details [8], which are quite unlike the largely generic characters in Monet’s or Pissarro’s versions of the scene. So let’s spend a little time describing them.

On the foreground pavement on the right, close to the wall, a black-hatted man is chatting with two women. One has long hair down her back, the other holds a pink parasol to protect herself from the sun. Just over the wall in the lower right corner is a warm-water bathing establishment, the Bains de la Samaritaine, with its signboard and the French tricolour fluttering languidly from its flagpole.

Another elegantly-dressed woman, with a child, walks past them. Further back along the wall, three workers are lounging, one looking over the wall to the river below. Further back, a gendarme with red epaulettes is talking with a white-bonneted women who is holding a dark basket. Beyond them is another strolling couple, a dog, and a uniformed officer standing on the corner looking out on the road. Beyond the corner is a small crowd and a child running across the road.

On the road, in the foreground, a man with a walking stick, wearing a straw boater and apparently reading a book, has just stepped off the pavement, followed by a small fluffy dog. Beyond him, two boys are talking to white-aproned vendor, while two adults push a wheelbarrow loaded with goods, perhaps flowers, that they are intending to sell, and a man is carrying a basket on his head. 

Further to the left of the roadway (Fig 7), a man lugs a large basket full of vegetables, and a woman with a black parasol walks toward us, her shadow almost touching Renoir’s signature in the left foreground. 

Near the pavement on the left, is a man who looks identical to the man with a walking stick whom we have already seen on the other side with the dog [9]. Beyond him on the pavement, some people have joined a small queue, headed by two gendarmes, waiting for the next horse-drawn omnibus.

The rest of the bridge is a rather chaotic mixture of horse-drawn vehicles ~ carriages, buses, coaches and cabs.

A city in transition and turmoil

To fully appreciate the context of this painting, we must first understand the enormous changes that had recently been taking place in Paris.

Renoir had lived in Paris for almost all his life and often painted it. It was in the streets of Paris that he felt “at home” [10]. However, since the early 1850s, Paris itself had recently been undergoing sweeping changes – large areas of medieval Paris had been pulled down and replaced with refashioned and extended streets and buildings, due to a massive rebuilding program ordered by Napoleon III and carried out by Baron Haussmann. This project was characterised by an emphasis on symmetry and perspective -- wide, straight streets and boulevards replaced narrow medieval alleys, leading from one square or major building to the next, creating attractive vistas. Large apartment buildings made from uniform dressed creamy-yellow limestone and conforming to height restrictions replaced old houses, with prominent balconies running the length of their first and top storeys [11].

This upheaval of the city was traumatic for many, mostly those in poorer neighbourhoods. But it had led to major benefits ~ better sanitation, more access to light, the opening up of public gathering and socialising areas, and improved traffic circulation. And, as we can see from the number of unescorted women in Renoir’s painting, the innovation of boulevards, together with the rise of department stores and better labour opportunities for women [12], provided opportunities for socialising, working and entertainment outside of the traditional confines of domesticity. 

Fig 9: Rue Reaumur before Haussmann (top) and today (bottom) [13] 

However, in many ways, Renoir still lamented the loss of the decrepit “old” Paris, which he remembered as “quaint, charming and brimming with life” [14]. In particular, Renoir bemoaned what he saw as shortcomings in the architectural craftsmanship of the new buildings, contrasting their “insipid” decoration with the “glorious craftwork” traditions of the past, and he urged for a more prominent role for artists in building design. 

According to Renoir, the new Louvre, for example, was “heavy, banal, and made by workers chosen at random” [15]. He also described the monumental Palais de Justice as both mechanical and fussy, unbearably monotonous, grotesque and deformed [16]. It’s even been suggested that when Renoir came to paint Le Pont Neuf, he deliberately positioned himself “in such a way that not a vestige of [the Palais de Justice] is to be seen across the river. In effect, he edited it out” [17].

Paris under foreign and civil wars

For Paris, more drama – and even horror -- was in store. Just two years before Renoir’s painting, France had unwisely declared war on Prussia. Unfortunately for France, the war was a disaster -- its soldiers were soundly beaten by the German and Prussian forces, and eventually, Paris was encircled and besieged. This led to catastrophic shortages of food, with citizens reduced to eating animals from the Paris Zoo. In January 1871, the war concluded with France’s total, humiliating defeat. 

Just a few weeks later, disaffected working class soldiers of the National Guard seized control of Paris, leading to the establishment of an independent revolutionary government, the “Paris Commune”. Its radical aims included the separation of church and state, self-governing communes, the abolition of child labour, elevating the rights of women and the working class, anti-monarchism, and the closing of Catholic churches and schools [18].

The Commune, however, lasted for only about two months. In May 1871, in the Semaine Sanglante (“Bloody Week”), the national French Army overpowered the Communards, killing an estimated 10,000 – 20,000+ in battles or by execution, taking thousands of prisoners, and regaining national control. As the Commune collapsed, it lashed out by executing the Archbishop of Paris, police and priests.

Some idea of the horror of the times can be gathered in one contemporary news report on the scene of a government execution of Communards: “The ghastliest sight in Pere-Lachaise [cemetery] was in the south-eastern corner, where, close to the boundary wall, there had been a natural hollow. The hollow was now filled up with the dead…. there they lay, tier above tier, each successive tier powdered over with a coating of chloride of lime -- two hundred of them patent to the eye, besides those underneath hidden by the earth covering layer after layer. Among the dead were many women…. Faces distorted out of humanity with ferocity and agony combined …How died these men and women?... They were posted up against that section of rock-pitted wall, and were shot to death as they stood or crouched” [19]. 

Reaction of the Impressionists

It is hard to credit that barely a year after this unrestrained internecine bloodshed and chaos, Renoir would be sitting down to paint his Le Pont Neuf, featuring Parisians going about their peaceable affairs, seemingly without a care in the world, except maybe whether their omnibus would arrive on time.

Renoir himself had been present in Paris during the Commune, so would have been starkly aware of the horrors of this period. He was shocked by the number of executions, but was not inclined to either glorify or decry the chaos and brutality of recent events. He simply preferred to concentrate solely on painting the things he wanted to paint. Renoir’s son Jean recalls that Renoir was fond of quoting the poet Jean de la Fontaine’s rather cynical aphorism, “Le sage dit, suivant les gens, vive le roi, vive la ligue”, which suggests that to survive during times of political unrest, a wise person should change their allegiance and words to match whoever holds power at the time [20]. This accorded with Renoir’s general view of life, that “One is merely a cork.… You must let yourself go along in life like a cork in the current of a stream” [21].

Most of Renoir’s artist colleagues, Manet aside, were also disinclined to directly depict the realities of 1870-71. One commentator, Sebastian Smee, has noted that this disinclination could have been partly “a collective act of psychological repression” and/or partly “an assertion of pacific values as an antidote to violence or trauma”. But he suggests that a better explanation was that these artists were reacting against the old state-sponsored hierarchies of art which placed a premium on depictions of acceptable, edifying episodes of history, heroism, valour or myth [22]. Instead, the Impressionists wished to concentrate on painting present-day, ordinary life -- particularly ordinary middle-class life – while abandoning traditional methods of applying paint or creating depth, and stressing the fluctuating effects of light. 

Purely from an artistic point of view, their approach has borne fruit. Initial reactions to their works were often hostile but, today, more than 150 years later, Impressionism remains one of the most popular and commercially valuable art movements in the world ■ 

© Philip McCouat 2026. First published October 2026.

This article may be cited as Philip McCouat, “‘Renoir’s Le Pont Neuf: Everyday life in Paris in the wake of chaos”, Journal of Art in Society (October 2026) https://www.artinsociety.com/renoirs-le-pont-neuf-everyday-life-in-paris-in-the-wake-of-chaos

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End Notes

[1] Theodore Reff, Manet and Modern Paris, NGA, Washington, 1982, at 42

[2] Reff, op cit at 42

[3] Colin B Bailey & Ors, ‘Renoir Landscapes 1865 – 1883’ (Exhibition Catalogue), National Gallery, London, 2007, at 112ff

[4] Strictly, the term “Impressionist” did not actually apply until 1874, when their first independent exhibition was held. For more details of that exhibition, see: Philip McCouat, “The Adventures of Nadar” Journal of Art in Society (2016) 

[5] Christopher Riopelle, “Renoir in the City”, in Bailey & Ors, op cit at 42

[6] As reported some years later at J Rewald, “Auguste Renoir and his brother”, Gazette des Beaux Artes, XXVI 1 3 (1945) 171 at 281

[7] Reff, op cit at 42

[8] Shelley Rice, Parisian Views, MIT Cambridge, 1977, at 70

[9] It’s possible that this dual character was posed by brother Edmond: see Bailey, op cit, footnote 8

[10] Riopelle, op cit at 33

[11] Philip McCouat, “Exploring Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day”, Journal of Art in Society (2023) 

[12] For example, working in shops: Nancy Britten, “The Haussmann Reconstruction”, Retrospect Journal, 1/4/2024 

[13] Moicani, “Paris before the Works of Baron Haussmann”, Moicani - L’Odénie, 2/2/2015 

[14] Riopelle, op cit at 37

[15] Riopelle, op cit at 38

[16] Riopelle, op cit at 46

[17] Riopelle, op cit at 46

[18] Sebastian Smee, Paris in Ruins, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2024, at 195ff. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would later describe the Paris Commune as the first example of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”

[19] Archibald Forbes, “The Suppression of the Paris Commune”, Daily News, 29 May 1871, reproduced in John Carey (ed), Eyewitness to History, Avon Books, New York 1987, at 386-87

[20] Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, Fontana, 1963, at 127

[21] Jean Renoir, op cit at 38

[22] Smee, op cit at 301.

© Philip McCouat, 2026

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