Exterior of the Saint Lazare Station Arrival of a Train

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Exterior of the Saint Lazare Station Arrival of a Train: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - Exterior of the Saint Lazare Station Arrival of a Train

Keywords: Exterior, Saint, Lazare, Station, Arrival, Train

Work Overview: Saint-Lazare Station, Arrival of a Train(Exterior of the Saint Lazare Station Arrival of a Train)
Claude Monet
Date: 1877
Style: Impressionism
Series: Saint-Lazare Station
Genre: cityscape

Paris Saint-Lazare is one of the six large terminus railway stations of Paris. It is the second busiest station in Paris, after the Gare du Nord. It handles 275,000 passengers each day. The station was designed by architect Juste Lisch, and the maître de l'oeuvre (general contractor) was Eugene Flachat.

In 1877, painter Claude Monet rented a studio near the Gare Saint Lazare. That same year he exhibited seven paintings of the railway station in an impressionist painting exhibition. He completed 11 paintings of this subject.[3][6] Oscar-Claude Monet's series of the Gare Saint-Lazare train station was one of his most famous series in his lifetime. Monet was one of the most important and influential painters in the Impressionist movement in the 19th century. He was a strong proponent of plein-air landscape painting. Artists such as Caillebotte, Degas and Morisot, do this in order to accurately portray the scene in the moment instead of creating the painting from what they could remember. Monet and others who followed the Impressionism Movement were not accepted in the Salon de Paris, because of their rejection of the academies’ teachings of form, style, subject matter etc., so instead they decided to open a new exhibition on their own Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874.

Claude Monet's depiction of this train station is an astonishing composition in which the hard-edged discs of the railroad signals hover above a rapidly scribbled swirl of blue and rose clouds of steam, with scrolled white edges, while the sketchy, angular drawing of the tracks and buildings provides contrast. The flat, opaque circle of the largest signal, placed dead center and thickly painted, is so insistent that it turns the picture into a near-abstraction.[7] The Gare Saint-Lazare piece was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. The Gare Saint-Lazare is far different than Monet’s previous paintings of harbors, boats and oceans that viewers had seen before. The Gare Saint-Lazare series of paintings lead the viewers through a tour of the train station in different points of the day. “Monet exemplifies the modern life, in all its chaos and instability,”[8] The steam coming from the trains creates a way of dissolving the train and showing the impressionistic style of blending colors and light. Everything dissipates with the steam of the train and turns into a flurry of blended colors. As said by Émile Zola, “Monet is able to turn a normally dirty and gritty place into a peaceful and beautiful scene…You can hear the trains rumbling in, see the smoke billow up under the huge roofs…that is where painting is today…our artists have to find the poetry in train station, the way their fathers found the poetry in forests and rivers.”[9] “Monet’s work on the Gare Saint-Lazare is unparalleled in its evocation of steam and the smoke-filled station. In spite of the impressionist style, the work reproduces accurately the topography of the area, even allowing one to deduce the precise point where the artist was standing while painting. This is the first time an artist had showed a single theme through a series of variations”[10]

The Gare Saint-Lazare itself, a monument to the last word in state-of-the-art transportation, the railroad. Le Quartier de l'Europe, where artists like Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte spent a lot of time and painted was, in short, a paradigm of modern Paris; the forward-looking young artists who called it home, and who had consciously dedicated themselves to the interpretation of modern life, included in their work recognizable references to their neighborhood as a sign of both their commitment to the present, with all its irregularities and "unaesthetic" components, and their rejection of the past, with its Academy-sanctioned conventions.[7]

Lesser-known artists who depicted the Gare Saint Lazare were Jean Béraud, who painted "The Place and Pont de l'Europe" in 1876-78 [4] and Norbert Goeneutte (1854–1894), with a studio providing a very good view of the Pont de l'Europe, who painted this scene many times in the late 1880s. One of these is "The Pont de l'Europe and Gare Saint-Lazare" from ca. 1888 (in the Baltimore Museum).[4]

An engraving showing the Place de l'Europe bridge at the time of its opening in 1868 was made by Auguste Lamy.[11]

In 1932, the wasteland behind the station became the subject of one of the most celebrated photographs of all time, Henri Cartier-Bresson's Derrière la gare de Saint-Lazare.

In Raymond Queneau's 1947 book Exercises in Style, the Gare Saint-Lazare serves as the backdrop to much of the story's action.

In 1998 the Musée D'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., put on an exhibition called "Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare".

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