The Artist and the Bridge

1700-1920

John Sweetman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429801952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

First published in 1999, this book explores how, from the stone bridges of neoclassicism which soar out of wild woods to span pastoral valleys to the post-1750 engineer's bridge with its links to the more industrial landscape, the bridge was a popular feature in painting throughout the period 1700-1920. Why did so many artists choose to portray bridges? In this lavishly illustrated and intriguing book, John Sweetman seeks to answer this question. He traces the history of the bridge in painting and printmaking through a vast range of work, some as familiar as William Etty's The Bridge of Sighs and Claude Monet's The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil and others less well known such as Wassily Kandinsky's Composition IV and C.R.W. Nevinson's Looking Through the Brooklyn Bridge. Distinctive characteristics emerge revealing the complex role of the bridge as both symbol and metaphor, and as a place of vantage, meeting and separation.

1 Views and sightlines 1700–1800

Some cities turn their backs on their rivers and bridges: others, notably Paris, are unimaginable without them. The story of the French King Henri IV, seeing through the completion of the Pont Neuf in 1606, and leaping the gap between two of its sections in front of an applauding crowd of citizens, seems to sum up an attitude. Affection for the city’s central bridges has been commemorated in song, and has lasted to the present day. It has helped to ensure that several of the earliest have been reconstructed to preserve their original lines. The Pont des Arts, connecting the Louvre and the Institut de France, was not built until 1801–3. Made of the relatively new material of metal and placed among much older and much respected stone neighbours, it might well have gone beyond recall when the question of its replacement arose, most recently in the 1980s. But here also the original design was renewed, with fewer arches.

It is no surprise to discover that Roman Paris (Lutetia) originated on a site which depended for outside communication on the presence of bridges. This was the Ile de la Cité, the tip of which was to provide the site for the statue of Henri IV between the two lengths of the Pont Neuf as it crossed the Seine. Here on the island the Palais de la Cité had in medieval times become the seat of monarchic power: and the kings traditionally took a close interest in the bridges. Five medieval structures led from the island, notably the (later reconstructed) Pont au Change and the Pont Notre Dame, with their lines of housing.

The road on the Pont Neuf, at the time of its completion, was wider (at 28 metres, 92 feet) than any on the existing bridges of Europe: and there were no houses. But the time-honoured practice of using this bridge as fairground and marketplace must often have frustrated contemplative viewing: as indeed, according to the notary in Laurence Sterne’s travel-fantasy A Sentimental Journey (1768), did the winds that were met with on the bridge. A ‘cap-full of wind’ (Sterne clearly knew this from experience) was ‘more blasphemously sacre Dieu’d there than in any other aperture of the whole city’.¹ But Sterne, along with innumerable others, admired the Pont Neuf, and it has always attracted artists.

Shortly after Sterne made his comment, a fresh phase opened in the history of the Paris riverfront. In 1787, in line with the associations of French monarchs with the bridges, a new five-arch open structure was planned to bear the name of Louis XVI. A medal was struck in 1788 by Duvivier showing the original design by Perronet, the famous engineer responsible for the much-praised bridge downstream, the Pont de Neuilly, which we will examine later. Political revolution intervened, and the bridge finally emerged in altered form as the Pont de la Concorde. But the events of the 1780s, before the Revolution, had also begun to sweep away the past. The houses on the ancient foundations of the Pont au Change and the Pont Notre Dame had become decrepit and overhung the road between. Under the supervision of Bernard Poyet, Maître des Bâtiments de la Ville, they were demolished, and the bridges became ‘ponts découverts’. Hubert Robert (1733–1808) recorded these events in canvases of 1786 and 1788. In his monumental Tableau de Paris (1782–8) Louis-Sébastien Mercier was clear about the value of making the bridges true vantage points. ‘Behold the view we have made for you,’ he enjoins the visitor, ‘I pace these unshackled bridges in triumph.’ And he points the ‘finger of scorn’ at the houses of the Rue de la Pelleterie, ‘which still dares to obstruct my view!’²

Paris was not alone in providing new views of, and views from, its bridges. London too had recently (1757) dismantled the housing on its single medieval bridge, and a second bridge (Westminster, 1739–50) and a third (Blackfriars, 1760–69) had been constructed.³ For a city which for six hundred years had managed with one bridge and had resisted all initiatives to build another, these events, in the teeth of opposition from ferrymen and other interested parties, were little short of momentous. The bridge at Westminster had been portrayed, both at different stages of construction and completed, by Canaletto (1697–1768) and Samuel Scott (c. 1702–72), and that at Blackfriars in a memorable print by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), working in Rome and seeing in its design evidence of London as a modern successor to his city (p. 45). Wordsworth, viewing London from Westminster Bridge in 1802, was to turn an English form of Mercier’s bridge elation into a sonnet, also to be discussed later (p. 87).

The four artists who have now been mentioned – Canaletto, Scott, Piranesi and Robert – produce the dominant bridge images of the eighteenth century, and these, based on the four cities they portrayed, Venice as seen by Canaletto, Rome by Piranesi, London by Scott and Paris by Robert, must be our starting point. The artists’ choice of such subjects might, indeed, be expected as part of the experience of working in such cities. But it is noticeable that Canaletto’s presence in London (1746–56) appears to have prompted Scott, an established marine painter, to make something of a speciality of his own bridge and river views; while Hubert Robert, who combined wide interests in landscape, garden design and urban scenes, developed in France an almost obsessive concern with bridge subjects, in part from the direct stimulus of Piranesi that he had received in Italy. Piranesi’s direct involvement with a British bridge subject has already been mentioned. His etching of Blackfriars was done a few years after 1757, when the artist had become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London.

The eighteenth century, as a vitally important period for improvements in communications, placed special importance on bridges. Writing in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), Defoe describes the extensive road-making programme that was carried through under the supervision of road commissioners. He also refers to ‘abundance of bridges to be repair’d and enlarg’d, and new ones built where they find occasion’, and to the building of ‘above three hundred new [bridges], where there were none before, or where the former were small and insufficient to carry the traveller safe over the waters’.⁴ In France the name of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées is sufficient to point to the interdependence of bridges and roads: from 1747 the reorganization of the Ecole was to give France an unmatched reputation in both. Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708–94), the famous engineer, was the school’s director. The technical expertise contained in the standard work on bridge construction, Henri Gautier ‘s Traité des Ponts (1716), encouraged adventurous thinking, to which Perronet was to add. His five equal, flattened stone arches supporting an absolutely level roadway at Neuilly (1768–72) deeply impressed contemporaries such as Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Young. Perronet’s Description des Projets (1782–3), containing illustrations of this bridge, made its innovations generally available.⁵

Though roads might improve, travel along them remained slow. When it took three-and-a-half days to reach Marseilles from Lyons by mule-drawn diligence, many Grand Tourists were tempted to take the swifter river-boats down the Rhône. If they did, they would have to negotiate, like Tobias Smollett in 1763, the passage of the ‘famous’ Pont Saint-Esprit, with its twenty-five arches spanning the fast-flowing waters.⁶ The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1755 devotes a plate to comparing it and the medieval Pont de la Guillotière at Lyons with the new bridge at Westminster.⁷ At 914 metres (3000 feet), the twelfth-century Pont Saint-Esprit was still the longest bridge in Europe. Dickens in 1844 comments on ‘the famous Pont d’Esprit, with I don’t know how many arches’.⁸ Thirty kilometres (20 miles) downstream the Tourist came to another celebrated medieval bridge, that of Saint Bénézet at Avignon. This had been built from 1178 by the Frères Pontifs, with twenty-two arches. Flood waters had destroyed much of it in the seventeenth century, but, long celebrated in music (a medieval chanson formed the basis of a mass by Certon published in 1553, and a children’s song had since become popular), its remaining spans were one of the sights of Europe.⁹

Alternative routes to Italy over the Alps presented obvious problems. The passage of the Saint Gothard involved crossing the notorious Devil’s Bridge, which will detain us later (pp.59, 61, nn. 11 and 111). Though all the high, main Alpine roads in Switzerland were only built after 1800, lowland roads there were often much improved by 1750, and the bridges were sometimes provided even at higher altitudes (for example those built in 1738–9 to service the mule-tracks along the Via Mala).¹⁰ But in 1739 Horace Walpole laments the precarious state of the old footbridges on the way to the Grande Chartreuse.¹¹ And in 1770 Charles Burney, returning across the Ligurian Apennines north of Genoa (hardly less of a challenge than the Alps), flicked by overhanging trees and kicked by his mule, vociferates with feeling: ‘Such bridges! Such rivers! Such rocks!’¹²

‘Such aqueducts!’ was also the cry of the eighteenth-century traveller who might be moved by the thought of watercourses high in the air. The Roman aqueducts near Lyons, admired by Philip Thicknesse in 1776, and the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, under which he ate his lunch, will have alerted visitors to remarkable engineering feats in the past.¹³ Rousseau, Smollett and others had memorable experiences at the Pont du Gard, as we shall see (pp. 60, 68). And anyone using the 240-km (150-mile) Languedoc Canal (now called Canal du Midi), built by a labour force of 8000 men in the short space of fifteen years (1666–81) and connecting the Garonne valley with the Mediterranean, will in turn have sensed the achievements in aqueduct and tunnel construction of the modern world. In 1756 Nugent, the historian of the Grand Tour, called it the greatest work of its kind in Europe.¹⁴ Thomas Jefferson, who sailed along it in 1787, was one of thousands of tourists to do so.¹⁵

But the main object of the Grand Tourist was to arrive in Italy, and see Rome. Having gained the north Italian plain, many travellers took the Brenta canal to Padua and Venice, an obvious target if Carnival time was near. Verona, where in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: The approaches
• 1 Views and sightlines 1700–1800
• 2 New encounters, new effects 1730–1800
• 3 Far objectives, missed connexions 1800–1850
• 4 Realities and ideals 1800–1920
• Bibliographical notes
• Index