Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare
Claude Monet
1877
The Impressionists frequently paid tribute to the modern aspects of Paris. Their paintings abound with scenes of grand boulevards and elegant, new blocks of buildings, as well as achievements of modern construction such as iron bridges, exhibition halls, and train sheds. Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare was an especially appropriate choice of subject for Claude Monet in the 1870s. The terminal, linking Paris and Normandy, where Monet’s technique of painting outdoors had been nurtured in the 1860s, was also the point of departure for towns and villages to the west and north of Paris frequented by the Impressionists. Monet completed eight of his twelve known paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in time for the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877, probably placing them in the same gallery.Monet chose to focus his attention here on the glass-and-iron train shed, where he found an appealing combination of artificial and natural effects: the rising steam of locomotives trapped within the structure, and daylight penetrating the large, glazed sections of the roof. Monet’s depictions of the station inaugurated what was to become for him an established pattern of painting a specific motif repeatedly in order to capture subtle and temporal atmospheric changes. But the series also represented his last attempt to deal with urban realities: from this point on in his career, Monet would be largely a painter of landscapes.
| Title | Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare |
|---|---|
| Artist | Claude Monet |
| Date | 1877 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Style | Impressionism |
| Dimensions | 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23 3/4 × 31 1/2 in.) |
About Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a pioneer of the French artistic movement known as Impressionism. Throughout his long career, Monet portrayed the people closest to him and the places he knew best. He favored family and friends as models, often working and exhibiting alongside fellow artists. In the early years he painted the forests of Fountainbleau, Parisian boulevards, suburban villages along the Seine, seaside towns, and flowering fields, and later, after buying a house at Giverny northwest of Paris, stacks of wheat and water lilies. Monet was a proponent of plein air painting, working directly out-of-doors on compositions he would later revise and sometimes complete in his studio. He painted his beloved water lilies in Giverny, where he tended to a water garden and a small pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. Another favorite subject, meules (stacks of wheat sometimes referred to as “haystacks”), were for Monet a resonant symbol of sustenance and survival—constructed by humans but created by nature.
While Monet’s series paintings appear compositionally simple, the artist adapted his palette and brushwork to each temporal situation, conveying the complexity of color, light, and texture on each canvas. As he described, “One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all.” Only by working in series could Monet truly render, as he put it, “what I experience”—in other words, how he perceived and responded to these subjects, which were defined by light and air as time passed and the seasons changed.
The Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s stacks of wheat in the world. An online scholarly publication delves into the museum’s collection of Monet’s paintings and drawings.