About this work
is an 1877 oil on canvas that puts you squarely inside one of Paris's great machines. A steam train from Normandy pulls into the station as crowds wait amid billowing smoke and steam, all sheltered beneath the vaulted iron-and-glass train shed.
A large black locomotive arrives on the right, exhaling puffs of steam that spiral up toward the peaked glass roof; a conductor in a blue uniform stands in the foreground at center while figures dot the platform to the left; large city buildings, rendered loosely, loom in the background. The palette is dominated by cool blues and greys, but Monet animates every surface — the billowing vapour shimmers with lilac, cream, and soft amber, the iron girders slice through the haze in angular dark strokes, and the foreground tracks recede into an almost earth-like ochre. The dark angular lines of the roof's girders contrast with the random patterns formed by the vapour, and by including the closed roof at the top of the picture, Monet turns the conventions of landscape upside down — the light and clouds of an open sky are contained inside a resolutely modern structure of glass and iron.
By the end of 1876, Monet had grown restless in Argenteuil and, with the financial assistance of Gustave Caillebotte, rented a studio on the rue Moncey in Paris — just a few blocks from the Gare Saint-Lazare, the terminus for the Normandy rail line.
He was granted permission to paint the station and its approaches in January 1877, and the place held a deep personal charge: it was the Paris terminal for trains to Normandy, where he had grown up.
The painting is one of twelve works Monet made depicting the station, and one of eight he exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in April 1877.
Although the Saint-Lazare canvases lack the strict temporal cohesiveness of the series Monet would begin in the 1890s, they mark a new direction for his work unprecedented in the history of modern art — and his decision to exhibit them together as a group presaged the exhibition strategies he would use two decades later with his Stacks of Wheat.
At that exhibition, Émile Zola commended Monet for capturing the excitement and energy of the modern train station.
With this series, Monet inaugurates the principle that would become his signature: the repeated representation of the same motif to capture atmospheric and temporal variation.
As a print, this painting rewards spaces that can hold a little drama — a high-ceilinged hallway, a sitting room with grey or slate-blue walls, a loft with exposed
