In the years that he spent at Argenteuil, Monet began to work on a number of sequences of paintings in which he repeated subjects. These works were forerunners of the famous series that Monet created from 1891 to his death. One important aspect of the connection between the early sequences and the later series is the iconographic content of these works. Just as the later series are often viewed as an approach to pure abstraction, the earlier sequences are often viewed solely as the height of technical accomplishment in Impressionism. Yet, whether one considers the series of grainstacks from the 1890s or the earlier sequences of bridges at Argenteuil, these groupings of painting carry themes and meanings that are often overlooked in the attention that is paid to the evolution of Monet's Impressionist technique. The early sequence of the highway bridge at Argenteuil show the beginnings of the artist's interest in this aspect of landscape painting.
Claude Monet (1840-1926) spent the major part of his forties at Argenteuil. The small picturesque town was located on the Seine, a fifteen-minute rail trip north of Paris. The town was a popular destination for Sunday outings and widely regarded as one of the most beautiful spots around Paris. For Monet this period was significant not only for the extent to which he realized his technical goals in painting, but for the fact that his first sequences, forerunners of the famous series, began to take shape there. For these six years Monet's principal subjects at Argenteuil were the river, his garden, and the countryside. One of the most interesting of these early sequences was the paintings of the highway bridge at Argenteuil. Taken as a group these paintings display the artist's interest in a number of topics of contemporary interest. In addition to being a part of the landscape in which Monet was perfecting of his technique, its depiction commented on both the positive and negativ...