Pont-Neuf, Paris, from "Etchings of Paris"
Charles Meryon French
Not on view
It seems likely that the poet Charles Baudelaire had this print in mind in 1859 when he admired "the majesty of accumulated stone" in Meryon’s work juxtaposed with "obelisks of industry, spewing forth . . . conglomerations of smoke" and "prodigious scaffolding of monuments under repair" that overlaid an "openwork architecture of a paradoxical beauty" upon the city. The seventeenth-century Pont-Neuf—the oldest surviving bridge in Paris at the time—was one such monument undergoing extensive renovation when Meryon made this print.