The Railway

1873

Oil on canvas, 93.3 × 111.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington

A young woman with a book and a puppy sits by an iron railing while a girl looks through at the steam below. Manet sent it to the Salon of 1874.

Manet kept to the official Salon and did not join the independent exhibition his friends opened in April 1874.
The setting is the rail yard leading into the Gare Saint-Lazare, beside Manet's new studio.
Manet never says whether the two are mother and daughter or nanny and child. Impressionist pictures likewise show a slice of modern life with no story attached.
The figures mirror each other: one faces us, the other turns away.
Horace Havemeyer bequeathed it to the National Gallery in 1956.

The Gare Saint-Lazare served the western suburbs and the Normandy coast. Monet and Caillebotte also painted its iron bridge, the Pont de l'Europe.