Exterior of Saint-Lazare Station, Arrival of a Train

Exterior of Saint-Lazare Station, Arrival of a Train (Extérieur de la gare Saint-Lazare, arrivée d'un train) is one of the twelve paintings Claude Monet made at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1877. Standing in the yard outside the station, he painted a locomotive coming straight toward him, its two headlamps glowing orange through a gray-white fog of steam, with the tall apartment buildings of the quarter rising behind. It is in a private collection and is initialed and dated Cl. M. 77 at lower right.

What you are looking at

The canvas is relatively small, about 60 by 72 cm, and almost square. A dense veil of steam, painted in white, pale gray and blue, fills most of it. In the center, slightly right, the dark front of a locomotive pushes through the haze, its two round lamps glowing warm orange, and behind it a tender or carriage is suggested by a few dark strokes. At right, a second train or wagon stands in shadow, painted in dark green-black and brown.

The background is the city. At right a tall apartment block, cream with rows of dark windows and a mansard roof, rises above the steam; in the center distance another block, paler and grayer, sits behind the haze; at left, a third building is almost entirely dissolved. Two small structures in warm brown and orange, a signal cabin and a shed, sit low in the middle ground. The foreground is a band of brown and gray ballast crossed by diagonal rails, laid in with long dragged strokes.

Where and when it was painted

Monet began working at the Gare Saint-Lazare in January 1877, renting a small flat in the nearby rue Moncey while still living at Argenteuil, whose trains left from this station. The Western Railway company let him set up his easel on the platforms and in the yard, and over about three months he produced twelve canvases. Seven of them were shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in April 1877, where they hung together as a group, an early sign of the series method he would develop in the 1890s. See our Gare Saint-Lazare series page for the complete group.

How it was painted

This is one of the more sketch-like canvases in the series, painted quickly and broadly. Monet worked the steam wet into wet, so that its edges melt into the buildings behind, and he used the bare, light ground in places to keep the whole picture pale. The locomotive is the only area of strong dark, and the two orange lamps the only warm accents in the center. Their glow, seen straight on, gives the picture its focus and a sense of something approaching fast out of the fog.

How this version differs

The arrival of a train was one of Monet's key motifs in 1877. Inside the shed, he painted it in the large canvases now at Harvard and the Art Institute of Chicago. This exterior version shows the same moment from the yard, among the apartment blocks, and is grayer and more veiled than the sunlit Sun Effect, which shows the same neighborhood under clear sky. Compare also the Musée d'Orsay's La Gare Saint-Lazare, where a locomotive sits under the glass roof.

Steam as subject

Monet's critics noticed that the real subject of these pictures was steam. The writer Hugues Le Roux later recalled him waiting by the tracks like a hunter for the moment a departing engine released its cloud. In this canvas the steam is everything: it softens the buildings, hides most of the train and turns the scene into a play of white, gray and blue around two points of light.

Where to see it

The painting is in a private collection and not on public view. For museum versions of the series, in Paris, London, Chicago, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Hannover and Hakone, see where to see Monet's paintings.