Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare
Claude Monet
1877
One of the most avant-garde aspects of the Impressionists was their choice of subject matter, which frequently included scenes derived from modern, industrial Paris, from iron bridges to exhibition halls to train sheds. The train station at Saint-Lazare would have been a familiar, meaningful sight to Claude Monet in the 1870s. The terminal linked Paris to Normandy, where the artist developed his technique of painting outdoors in the 1860s. It was also the point of departure for the towns and villages west and north of Paris that the Impressionists frequently visited. Monet completed eight of his twelve known paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in time for the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877, probably displaying 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 artifi cial and natural effects—the rising steam of locomotives trapped within the structure and the daylight penetrating large, glazed sections of the roof, for instance. 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, as in his famous series of stacks of wheat. But the Saint-Lazare paintings also represented his last attempt to capture urban life: from this point on in his career, Monet largely devoted himself to 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.); Framed: 80.7 × 100.4 × 10.2 cm (31 3/4 × 39 1/2 × 4 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.