Løkke Bridge ( no, Løkke bro; nn, Løkke bru), across the Sandvikselva river at

Sandvika Sandvika () is the administrative centre of the municipality of Bærum in Norway. It was declared a city by the municipal council in Bærum on 4 June 2003. Sandvika is situated approximately west of Oslo. It is the main transportation hub for W ...

, is the first cast iron bridge in

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

. It is the subject of a painting by

Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. Durin ...

History

The bridge was cast at the ironworks at

Bærums Verk Bærums Verk is a village in Bærum in Akershus, Norway, with a population of about 8000. It is located on both sides of the river Lomma. History Iron ore was found in the areas now known as Kirkerud and Eineåsen in Bærum in 1603 and 1604, a ...

and installed in 1829. It has a span of 23 metres. The

spandrel A spandrel is a roughly triangular space, usually found in pairs, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame; between the tops of two adjacent arches or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently fill ...

s have ten circular holes, in decreasing sizes. In 1977, to allow for road widening, the bridge was moved upstream by several metres, where it now serves as a cycle- and footbridge, parallel to its road-bridge replacement, which carries Elias Smiths vei.

Painting

In 1895, while visiting Sandvika during a two month trip to visit his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, who lived in Oslo (then called Christiania), Claude Monet made an oil painting of the bridge. It was one of 29 works he painted on the trip, six of which feature scenes in Sandvika. The 73.4×92.5 cm work is now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Since being donated to them by a private owner in 1961-1963, it has been exhibited in Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Japan.

References

{{Reflist Bridges completed in 1829 Road bridges in Norway Iron bridges