North Carolina Museum of Art

Few subjects recall the Impressionists' fascination with changing effects of atmosphere and water as much as Pissarro's views of Rouen. He was the most receptive to experimentation with ideas of his colleagues. When he saw Monet's pictures of Rouen Cathedral, created as a series, he found in them "the superb unity which I have been seeking for a long time." Pissarro, who had painted in Rouen earlier, was drawn back in 1896 by Monet's success. He selected a less monumental subject than Monet's, preferring the distant views of the Seine bridges he could see from his hotel window. Pissarro completed sixteen canvases of the bridges that year. He was delighted by the combination of natural mist and smoke from boats and factories. Like Monet's cathedrals, Pissarro's Rouen bridge paintings vary greatly in color and light, depending on time of day and weather. He wrote to his son Lucien of his work saying, "what interests me especially is a motif of the iron bridge in the wet, with much traffic, carriages, pedestrians, workers on the quays, boats, smoke, mist in the distance, the whole scene fraught with animation and life." Such urban scenes are more frequent in Pissarro's career work than in that of any other major Impressionist.