1901
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Le Pont Neuf is a 1901 by Auguste Lepère, depicting Seine, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris from the river. Boats called bateaux-lavoirs line the water—fold-up laundry barges where women washed clothes. You see orderly rows of closed wooden cabins instead of open chaos like older prints. Lepère’s style keeps details sharp but softens edges, a mix of etching and loose color. He worked in the early 1900s when Paris cleaned up its riverfront. The boats look almost like floating apartments, tidy and still. Pair this view with Auguste Lepère’s etchings of old Paris to see how his style changed.
Like Charles Meryon, Auguste Lepère was known for etchings of Paris. This work shows how bateaux-lavoirs (wash boats) changed over the course of a half century, as dissatisfaction grew about their unsanitariness and unattractiveness. In contrast to Meryon’s hectic scenes—in which laundresses lean out of open windows and stretch lines of laundry along the river’s paved banks—the boats appear here as orderly and uniform structures, closed so that the women working within were not visible to passersby.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis-Auguste Lepère (30 November 1849 – 20 November 1918) was a French painter and etcher. Lepère is also considered a leader in the creative revival of wood engraving in Europe.
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