In turning to the Pont Neuf, Duncan Grant engaged with a subject deeply embedded in the history of French painting, stretching from seventeenth century topographical views to the Impressionists, notably Renoir and Pissarro, who made the bridge a theatre of modern light and movement.

The Pont Neuf connects the Île de la Cité to the Left Bank in Paris. In the mid-1930s, the Left Bank still retained its reputation as a centre of artistic and intellectual life, its studios, academies and cafés sustaining the cosmopolitan milieu that had shaped European modernism in the preceding decades. Grant’s vantage point from the Left Bank depicts the historic core of the Île de la Cité, framing the Pont Neuf against a skyline defined by Sainte-Chapelle and the western towers of Notre-Dame. These Gothic monuments, long embedded in the visual identity of Paris, are built up by Grant through bold blocks of colour, their architectural complexity translated into a distinctly modern language.

Grant visited Paris in the winter of 1935, and he made at least one other painting during his trip, depicting the Place du Furstemberg, a short distance from Pont Neuf [fig. 1]. Both subjects were a short walk from the Right Bank hotel where he usually stayed, l’Hotel de l’Univers et du Portugal at 10 rue Croix des Petits Champs. Throughout his lifetime, Grant continually returned to Paris, engaging directly with its visual and intellectual currents, which had shaped his own practice so intensely.

Paris Bridge was acquired by Kenneth Clark, recently appointed Director of the National Gallery and already a perceptive advocate of Grant’s art. Clark’s admiration centred on Grant’s instinct for colour as a constructive force. This composition illustrates that quality of Grant’s work that appealed to Clark, as he explained in a review of Grant’s 1933 exhibition ‘Duncan Grant’s vision is so instinctively chromatic that he can build up a passage of modelling with strokes of pure colour, each one of which falls perfectly into its place.’[1]

Clark and his wife Jane (née Martin) gave this painting to Jane’s brother Kenneth Martin and his new wife Edith. The gift was most likely made on the occasion of Kenneth and Edith’s wedding, which took place around 1938, and remained in the Martin family until 2025.

[1] New Statesman and Nation, 17 June 1933. Quoted in Frances Spalding, (1997) Duncan Grant: A Biography, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 321.