RAILWAY PAINTINGS BY MONET

The main movement in French painting in the latter half of the 19th century, Impressionism, coincided with the expansion of the railways, and particularly the local network radiating from the new grand termini in Paris, such as the Gare St. Lazare, which had been enlarged in 1868. The impact of the railway was immense; by 1869, of the 13 million annual passengers using St. Lazare 11 million were commuters from the outer suburbs. Thus, for example, the small village of Argenteuil, which before 1840 depended solely on agriculture and a small port for barges, was now only a 15-minute journey from Gare St. Lazare, and had become a bustling town with substantial industry including an iron works.

We have already seen that Monet had painted the Railway Bridge at Argenteuil in 1873, (left), but his interest in railways had started earlier, possibly inspired by Turner's Rain,Steam and Speed. In 1870 he painted his first picture to include a train, The Train in the Countryside; the train is only seen behind some trees as a plume of steam and a glimpse of some carriages on a distant horizontal embankment beyond a sunlit public park. He followed this in 1872 with a a painting simply called The Train, in which a locomotive hauls a long train of wagons stretching right across the lower foreground, with an enormous plume of steam rising diagonally from its stack, across an urban landscape crowded with factories and a 'forest' of tall chimneys.

While living in Argenteuil in 1872 Monet used the suburban train to travel into the Gare St. Lazare, Paris. On a winter's day he returned to a snow-covered Argenteuil station; in an evocative scene Train in the Snow, (1875), (right) he captures the grey stillness of a snowy dusk, with the locomotive standing out as a strong friendly machine which has brought the travellers safely home in spite of the bad weather.

He became so fascinated with the railways that in January 1877 he installed himself in a one-bedroom apartment on the Rrue Moncey in Paris just a few blocks away from the Gare St. Lazare so that he could study and sketch the activities from different angles at all times of the day as the light changed. The stationmaster cooperated by keeping trains late, and having some stoked up so that there were great clouds of steam and smoke filling the wonderful lofty station. By late March Monet had finished twelve views, in the first of his 'series' paintings.

In the Fogg Art Museum version (left) the view is that which the track-layer in his characteristic blue jeans would see looking out to the Pont de l'Europe, also painted by Caillebotte, a small section of which can just be seen through the clouds of steam. A train is standing alongside the right platform, with a great volume of smoke and steam rising from the stack to billow out up to the roof. The high pitched roof with large glass skylights is carried on slender columns, two of which can be seen on the right platform; Monet with artistic licence draws horizontal tie-bars which are slimmer than the heavier trusses required to carry the roof loads. The brightness of the whole scene suggests early morning light.

This lightweight roofing built by the engineer Eugene Flachat in 1867 daringly exploited the tensile strength of the latest materials. He had been a member of the economic reform group known as the Saint-Simonians, who preached the virtues of industry, especially of transport, canals, steamships, and railways, a radical philosophy for advanced capitalism.
In the version in the National Gallery, London, the view is from a platform with locomotives on each side, and on the right the arched exits into the main station building. The roof beams, the locomotives, and the cluster of passengers on the platform are silhouetted beyond the shed.

The version titled Arrival of Normandie Train, La Gare St Lazare, Paris (right), shows a much wider sweep of platform with only one locomotive pulled up to the buffers with a dense crowd of passengers leaving the train. In the middle distance there is a glimpse of the masonry towers and the iron trusses of the Pont de l'Europe spanning the approach tracks.

The most brightly lit version, in the Musée d'Orsay,(left), has sunlight flooding through the glass roof to give a dappled pattern on the tracks , and makes the buildings beyond the station glow. The locomotive on the central track is just about to move, indicated by the puffs of smoke from the stack and the clouds of 'warming-up' steam discharging from the cylinders on each side of the wheels

Monet took a new viewpoint outside to paint the approach of the locomotives into the station, in Le Pont de l'Europe (right), (which we saw from above in the Caillebotte). The iron trusses of the main girder lie diagonally downwards from the top right corner of the picture. In the left corner there is a stationary locomotive with men working on it amongst steam and smoke swirling about in this enclosed space.

These paintings invoked much critical comment. A fellow painter Riviere, who though liking the quality of the painting declared: "as regarding locomotives as monsters - around the monster men crawl over the tracks, like pygmies at the feet of a giant…one hears the workers' cries, the piercing whistles, the incessant noise of iron and the formidable breathing of the steam." Emile Zola, the novelist who had also been an early art critic approved of Monet's paintings: "Monet has contributed some superb railway station interiors...this is what painting today is all about…our artists must find the poetry of the railway station just as their fellows found that of the woods and rivers". The distinguished critic Huysmans stated that " the whole of modern life has still to be studied...the world of modern machinery and modern industry, only touched on by Monet in his pictures of the Gare St Lazare remains to be painted".