Loosely painted image of an open-air train station. On the right, a parked train gives off an enormous plumb of white smoke, making the scene look as though it were full of clouds. A huddled mass of barely discernible people crowd around the train on both sides of the tracks. Blue, green, and gray tones dominate.

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.