Exterior of Gare Saint-Lazare, The Signal

Exterior of Gare Saint-Lazare, The Signal (La Gare Saint-Lazare à l'extérieur, le signal) is one of the twelve canvases Claude Monet painted at the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877, and the boldest in composition. A large, dark round signal disc on a post stands in the very center of the picture, like a full stop, while smoke and steam swirl around it and the city's buildings dissolve behind. It is the only painting from the series in a German public museum, held by the Landesmuseum Hannover (inv. PNM 941).

What you are looking at

The canvas is about 65 by 82 cm. The central disc, painted in dark green-gray with a lighter rim, rests on a thin post that ends at the bottom of the picture in a small boxy base. To the right, a second, taller signal post carries another disc, this one with a red cross on a pale ground, and further right still a third, smaller signal. These railway signals, which told drivers whether the line was clear, are the true subjects of the picture.

Around them, the yard is a haze of ocher ground, crossed by rails painted as thin dark lines. A railway worker in dark clothes stands at right beside the tall signal, and a few smaller figures can be found in the steam at center left. On the left a tall, pale building with chimneys rises through the smoke. The sky is full of movement: Monet painted the steam as looping, ribbon-like strokes of white, pink and cream that curl across a blue-gray ground, among the most calligraphic marks in his work of the 1870s. The initials Cl. M. are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In January 1877 Monet, then living at Argenteuil, rented a small flat in the rue Moncey near the Gare Saint-Lazare, the terminus of the Western Railway whose trains ran to Argenteuil and Normandy. With permission from the railway company he worked on the platforms, in the yard and under the Pont de l'Europe, the iron bridge where six streets meet above the tracks. In about three months he produced twelve canvases, and seven of them hung at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that April. Our Gare Saint-Lazare series page collects all twelve.

How it was painted

The design is daringly simple: two flat, round shapes against a field of movement. The disc is painted with thick, opaque color and a hard edge, while everything around it is soft, fluid and loosely brushed. That contrast between the fixed, mechanical signal and the drifting steam gives the picture its charge. Some scholars have seen in the series a picture of modern, standardized time, and here the signal, which controlled the timing of every train, stands for that order in the middle of the chaos.

The flat round motif and the cropped composition also show the influence of Japanese prints, which Monet collected, and of the photography of the period.

How this version differs

No other canvas in the series puts a single object so squarely at its center. The closest is Train Tracks at the Saint-Lazare Station in Hakone, where a smaller signal post stands among the rails. The exterior views Sun Effect and Arrival of a Train take a wider view of the same yard. For the interior of the shed, see The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train at Harvard and La Gare Saint-Lazare in the Musée d'Orsay.

The yard beyond the shed

The tracks outside the Gare Saint-Lazare were a dense network of lines, points and signals, where trains to the western suburbs and Normandy were sorted before entering the station. For a painter, the yard offered what the glass shed did not: open sky, distance and the movement of steam in the wind. In this canvas Monet seems to have stood among the signals themselves, close enough that one fills the center of his view.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Landesmuseum Hannover, the state museum of Lower Saxony, whose Landesgalerie holds European painting from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, including a strong group of German and French Impressionists. Check the museum's website for current display, and see where to see Monet's paintings for other collections.