Le Pont Neuf represents an important rediscovery within Jean Béraud’s oeuvre, having remained unseen by the public since its acquisition by the family of the present owner in Paris in the 1920s. It complements the series of paintings Béraud made of passersby on the neighbouring Pont des arts, with the dome of the Institut de France visible beyond on the left bank. Of these related works (see Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud. The Belle Epoque: A Dream of t.mes s Gone By, Cologne, 1999, nos. 166, 167, 168, 168bis), one is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Here, Béraud captures the spirit of the moment, as workers, bankers in top hats, bakers, an upholsterer carrying a chair on his head, and cabbies make their way across Paris's oldest bridge, even in Béraud's day a listed monument. Shoppers flock to the capital's recently opened retail emporium, the La Samaritaine department store, overlooking the Seine immediately behind the artist's vantage point. It is intriguing to speculate about the possible identity of the moustachioed artist carrying a stretched canvas under one arm and his paint box under the other. Could he be Béraud himself, the observer observing himself? Or could he be the fictitious painter Elixir from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, known to have been a composite of Blanche, Helleu, Gervex, Vuillard, Whistler, and Jean Béraud?

The chimney on the right belongs to the Bains de la Samaritaine, the floating public bathhouse moored along the embankment beneath the bridge. The stylish and stunning vessel contained 100 bathtubs, placed in small cubicles over two floors. Parisians could go there for a simple bath, or for medicinal baths, steam baths, showers and hydrotherapy. The hydraulic pump and the immense filters used to purify the water of the Seine were installed in the roof space of the edifice. The chimneys of the heating boilers with their decoration of metal palms were famous throughout Paris.

Béraud’s paintings are today synonymous with the Paris Belle époque, so much so that at the turn of the century a scene of Parisian life came to be known as a ‘Béraud’. He adored the city, in all weathers, at any t.mes of day or night, indoors or out, and above all loved its people, whether the aristocracy and upper middle classes, the bourgeoisie, or the working people. His rigorous academic draughtsmanship, more akin to Gustave Caillebotte than to the impressionistic style of the so-called New Painters Monet and Pissarro, suited his minute, at t.mes s even humorous, observation of individual characters.