Gare Saint-Lazare – Monet

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare – Monet – 1877

The impressionists have often paid tribute to the contemporary characters of the city of love. Their paintings are filled with scenes of grand avenues and beautiful new apartment blocks, as well as contemporary achievements such as iron bridges, exhibition galleries, and railway sheds. The Gare Saint-Lazare , depicted in the painting “Arrival of the Normandy Train,” was a particularly fitting theme for Monet around the 1870s. This station, connecting Paris and Normandy and where Monet pioneered his open-air painting technique, was also the starting point for many of the communities and towns in the western and northern parts of Paris frequented by the impressionists. Claude Monet completed eight out of his twelve known paintings of the Saint-Lazare station in time for the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, likely displaying them all in the same gallery.

In this series, Monet focused on the innovative glass and iron railway shed of the time, where he found an attractive mix of artificial and natural elements: the rising smoke from the trains trapped in the architecture and the daylight seeping through the enormous glass sections of the roof. The series also represents his final attempt to deal with urban realities: from this point in his career, he became primarily a landscape painter.

Category: Tableau Monet

Original format 60.3 x 80.2 mm
© The Art Institute of Chicago