Interpretive Resource

Among Claude Monet’s contributions to the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 was a groundbreaking group of seven paintings of Gare St.-Lazare, the famous Parisian train station serving the suburbs along the Seine valley, as well as Normandy and Brittany. Installed together in one room, these works constituted Monet’s first series, a deliberate attempt to explore in multiple canvases a single subject at different times of day and under various atmospheric conditions.

The railway system effectively linked the country with the city. Monet frequently rode trains into and out of Paris, and although he was not a committed urbanite—in contrast to his Impressionist contemporary Edgar Degas for example—he was clearly aware of and fascinated by agents of industrial change. Rather than celebrating modern machines and buildings for their own sake, however, Monet explored in his art their power to transform nature. In Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, he seems to have asked: how do steam clouds pervade the air; how does a glass-and-iron roof filter sunlight; how do individuals disappear in a crowd?

Monet established this apparently straightforward composition by balancing the left-of-center peak of the shed over a train that thunders in toward the right. Order and disorder, in equal measure, pervade both the surface of the canvas and the scene itself; legend has it that Monet persuaded a station master to load standing engines with coal so that they would generate steam for him to portray. Thus, the quintessential painter of landscape evoked the controlled chaos of the urban environment, and of modernity itself.