At first sight, Monet's late Grandes Decorations are a far cry from the landscapes of his "high Impressionist" period of the 1870s, painted around fifty years earlier, In The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil of 1873 (fig. 1), the whole picture is built up of a series of contrasts: land and water, steam and sail; natural and man-made; warm and cool color; broad sweeps of paint and crisp little brush-marks.