The Notre-Dame Pump, Paris
Charles Meryon French
Not on view
The demolition of the water pump on the Notre-Dame bridge, ordered by the Paris municipal government in 1851, encouraged Meryon to select the old structure as a subject for his etching the following year. As part of the plan instituted by Emperor Napoleon III to improve city infrastructure, the water supply system was overhauled, rendering this seventeenth-century pump defunct. Meryon wrote in 1853 of his regret for its destruction, because the pump had been an "unusual and curious thing" in a city that was becoming "more and more regular."
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