Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare depicts the glass-and-iron train shed of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where a parked locomotive releases an enormous plume of pale steam that fills the scene like drifting cloud. Beneath the glazed roof, loosely brushed figures crowd both sides of the tracks, dissolving into the blue, green, and gray atmosphere. Monet was drawn to the station for its combination of artificial and natural effects: the trapped steam of the engines and the daylight filtering through the roof. The terminal held personal meaning for him, linking Paris to Normandy, where he had developed his outdoor painting technique in the 1860s. The work belongs to a series of twelve views of the Gare Saint-Lazare, eight of which Monet completed in time for the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. These paintings inaugurated his practice of repeatedly depicting a single motif to capture shifting atmospheric conditions, anticipating his later series such as the stacks of wheat. They also marked his final sustained engagement with modern urban life before he turned almost entirely to landscape.