Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

1877

Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago

A train pulls in under the glass-and-iron shed of the Paris terminal for Normandy. The station pictures were Monet's first series, a method he kept for life.

Monet paints the steam under the roof and the daylight through the glass, not the train. Impressionist painters often treated modern city sites as studies of changing atmosphere.
Eight of his twelve known station canvases were ready for the April 1877 exhibition.
Sold in March 1877 to the collector Ernest Hoschedé.
After this group Monet largely gave up city subjects for landscape.
Left to the Art Institute in 1933 by the Chicago collector Martin A. Ryerson.

The station stood in the same new quarter as the street in Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day. Monet's outdoor method had taken shape in Normandy in the 1860s.

series: Paintings of one motif made in sequence to record changing light or weather.

Themes

Tools for Painting Outdoors

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain