Existing comment:
Renoir's The Pont des Arts, Paris:
The Norton Simon Museum and the National Gallery of Art are partners in a long-term arrangement, exchanging master works that will hang temporarily with each other's permanent collections. Industrialist Norton Simon established the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in 1975 to create public access to his extensive collection, which includes more than 130 examples of nineteenth-century European painting. Among the most impressive is The Pont des Arts, Paris by Auguste Renoir.
Installed together in this room, the Norton Simon's The Pont des Arts, Paris and the National Gallery's Pont Neuf, Paris are fom a series of cityscapes completed by Renoir during the late 1860s through the early 1870s. The series celebrated the new modern Paris, showing brightly dressed urbanites parading in the open, sunlit spaces of the recently renovated city. With his light, sensitive brushwork, Renoir conveys a sense of the city's bustling energy while recording recognizable Parisian sites: the new Chatelet theaters and the seventeenth-century Institut de France in Pont des Arts, and the equestrian statue of King Henri IV in the center of the seventeenth-century bridge in Pont Neuf. Both views are found along the city's central artery, the river Seine. |