The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare)

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The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare): Edouard Manet

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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare)

Keywords: Railway, Gare, Saint, Lazare

Work Overview: The Railway (Gare Saint-Lazare)
Le Chemin de fer
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1873
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 93.3 cm × 111.5 cm ( 36 3⁄4 in × 45 1⁄8 in)
Location National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Railway, widely known as Gare Saint-Lazare, is an 1873 painting by Édouard Manet. It is the last painting by Manet of his favourite model, the fellow painter Victorine Meurent, who was also the model for his earlier works Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass. It was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1874, and donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1956.

Meurent is depicted sitting to the left side of the frame, in front of an iron fence near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The pensive subject is wearing a dark hat and sombre deep blue dress with white details, and is looking towards the viewer, while a sleeping puppy, a fan and an open book rest in her lap. Next to her is a little girl, modelled by the daughter of Manet's neighbour Alphonse Hirsch, a contrasting figure wearing a white dress with large blue bow, standing her back to the viewer, watching through the railings as a train passes beneath them. The black band in the girl's hair echoes the black band around the neck of the woman. Instead of choosing the traditional natural view as background for an outdoor scene, Manet opted for the iron grating which "boldly stretches across the canvas" (Gay 106). The only evidence of the train is its white cloud of steam. Modern apartment buildings can be seen in the background, including the house on the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, near the Place de l'Europe, where Manet had rented a studio since July 1872, and also a signal box and the Pont de l'Europe.

The arrangement compresses the foreground into a narrow focus, separated from the background by the row of railings. The traditional convention of deep space is ignored. Resting on a parapet to the right of the painting is a bunch of grapes, perhaps indicating that the painting was made in the autumn. The dog may be a reference to Titian's Venus of Urbino; Manet had earlier echoed Titian's composition in his Olympia.

Historian Isabelle Dervaux has described the reception this painting received when it was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy. Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized the symbol of modernity that it has become today".[1] The painting is currently in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[2]

Shortly after it was completed, the painting was sold to baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure. It was sold in 1881 for 5,400 francs to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who gave it several names: "Enfant regardant le chemin de fer", "Le pont de l'Europe", "A la Gare St. Lazare", and later just "Gare St. Lazare". It was sold on 31 December 1898 for 100,000 francs to American Henry Osborne Havemeyer. His wife Louisine Havemeyer left 2,000 artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on her death in 1929, but she divided a small collection, including The Railway, among her three children. The painting was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1956 on the death of her son Horace Havemeyer.

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The Railway, also known as Gare Saint-Lazare, is surely one of the most inscrutable paintings of the nineteenth century. Manet began work on it in the autumn of 1872, the year of Victor Hugo’s L’Année Terrible, a collection of poems outlining the catastrophic events of 1870-1: France’s defeat by the Prussians, Bismarck’s devastating siege of Paris, and the violence that saw out the Paris Commune in the summer of 1871; a truly terrible year in which, all told, through combat, starvation or civil strife, almost 200,000 French lost their lives.

The painting, Manet’s first major canvas since the outbreak of war, went on show in the Paris Salon of 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, heralding the ascendancy of a style of art that stood for leisure, pleasure, spontaneity, freedom and nature. Situated between these two historical moments, Manet’s work stands on the crossroads: both serious and playful, unfettered and restrained.

The painting shows two figures, a seated woman and a standing child, in front of a set of iron railings; behind them are railway tracks, a barely perceptible group of workers next to a shed, an iron bridge and, furthest away, the facades of residential houses. The woman’s cropped dress and the subtle diagonals of the structural setting create a sense of uncertainty, as though chance has had a hand in framing the scene, as though we have somehow stumbled upon it? Her reading interrupted, by us or by her own thoughts, a finger placed to mark her page, the woman looks at us directly. Who is she and who are we to her?

The model is Victorine Meurent, Manet’s muse of the 1860’s who posed for both Olympia and the nude figure in Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Here she exudes a sense of middle-class propriety, fashionably dressed in a deep blue dress with large, light blue buttons, wide cuffs and collars. In her lap a puppy doses, the child’s pet perhaps, the red fan behind it finding echoes in the flowers in her hat, the girl’s pendant earring and the rail worker’s shirt to the left. The black hat is a clever device, tilted forwards as was the fashion and held in place with a tie-back bow. Not only does it elevate the figure to a level slightly higher than the girl, it also neatly emphasizes the flatness of the picture plane, an effect enhanced further of course by the iron railings. The interplay of flatness and depth is one of Manet’s most daring innovations, inspired perhaps by his growing familiarity with Japanese woodblock prints.

Used expertly here, the technique sets off perfectly the ambiguous relationships between the two principle figures. Both connected and oddly detached, we sense they belong together, the matching colours of their dresses suggesting the fact, but quite how remains unclear. Is she her daughter, her niece, her sister? Is she a governess and the girl her ward?

To confound us further, the child – who was in fact the daughter of Manet’s painter friend Alphonse Hirsch—has her back turned to us, a compositional device known as the Rückenfigur. Just as we cannot see her face, whatever has grabbed her attention, a departing train we might imagine, is obstructed from view.

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The Railway, by Edouard Manet, is an 1873 painting which is popularly known as the Gare Saint-Lazare. The painting is dominated by 2 figures: a middle-aged woman and a little girl. It is one of Manet’s imperative paintings.

The woman posing in the painting is Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Manet’s most astounding pictures: Luncheon on the Grass and the Olympia. In this painting, she sits behind a tall iron fence holding an open book and a sleeping puppy. To her left, a little girl watches a train passing beneath them.

Artistic Techniques
It is most likely that Manet made the drawings of the location outdoors, and later carried out his painting in a studio. He laid lights and darks beside each other, creating bold contrasts that challenged conventions of shade and subtleness. The contrasts are found throughout the painting, neutralizing and flattening the composition.

Manet sustained the idea of 3 dimensionality on a flat surface while banishing modeling. The technique defied the customary way of understanding a picture where deep space is ignored. It also compresses the foreground into a narrow focus.

The Gare Saint–Lazare, in 1873 the largest and busiest train station in Paris, is unseen in this painting. Advances in industrial technology and train travel, intrinsic to most contemporary depictions of the site, remain in Manet's painting the almost invisible background for a genre depiction of a woman and child. Confined to a narrow space backed by the black bars of an iron fence and isolated by clouds of steam sent up from a train passing below, Manet's two models are enigmatic presences. The woman is Victorine Meurent, Manet's favorite model in the 1860s, and the child was the daughter of a fellow painter who allowed Manet to use his garden to create The Railway. The composition is a complex contrapuntal apposition of the two figures: one clad in a white dress trimmed with a blue bow and the other dressed in dark blue trimmed with white; one with hair bound by a narrow black ribbon and the other with flowing tresses under a black hat; and one a child standing and looking at anonymous trains and buildings in the background and the other a seated adult staring forward to confront viewers directly.

Manet submitted four works to the Paris Salon of 1874. Of the four, only two were accepted, The Railway and a watercolor. Reviewers were critical of the unfinished appearance of The Railway and that the rail station itself was not well–defined in the picture. Although Manet never chose to associate himself officially with the impressionist group, this painting’s scene of modern life, as well as its loose, abstract effects, show the influence of the younger artists on his work.

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