This view of the Seine is signed and dated December 1804. At the time, its author, the architect, draughtsman and landscape designer Jean Thoma Thibault, was working on several projects linked to Napoleon Bonaparte's closest circle: the Château de la Malmaison for the Empress Josephine, Saint-Leu for Louis Bonaparte, and Neuilly and the Elysée for the Grand Duke of Berg, Joachim Murat.
In this view, in addition to depicting the commercial activity of the river and the liveliness of the docks on its banks, he paints in the background the light structure of the bridge that Bonaparte, as first consul, had ordered to be built by decree in 1801 between the Louvre and the College of the Four Nations, now the Institute, in a new construction material, iron, making it the first metal bridge in France, a material that had only previously been used in two English bridges. The view must have been painted on the occasion of the first anniversary of the inauguration of this bridge, known as the "Pont des Arts" because it led to the Louvre, then known as the Palais des Arts.
The view is an exercise in depth and mastery of linear perspective by an architect who at the end of his life taught this discipline at the Royal School of Fine Arts and left a treatise on the subject published posthumously by one of his students.
