Train in the Countryside

Train in the Countryside (Train dans la campagne) is a small summer landscape Claude Monet painted around 1870, in the countryside west of Paris. A train of open carriages runs along a raised embankment at the top of the picture, trailing smoke, while below it people stroll and sit on a sunny meadow. It is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which holds it under the MNR label as a work recovered after the Second World War.

What you are looking at

The meadow fills the lower half of the canvas with a broad sweep of yellow-green grass that rises to the right, painted in flat, sunlit strokes. Long, soft shadows of trees lie across it in darker green. Near the left center stands a slender young tree, its trunk bare and its leaves painted in loose dabs of olive and yellow; to its left a rounder, darker tree, and at far right a tall poplar-like tree in deep green.

Behind them a dense band of dark woodland runs across the picture, and above that, on an embankment or low viaduct at upper left, a train passes from left to right. Its carriages are tiny, a row of black and white rectangles with figures visible in the open cars, and its engine sends a long trail of gray-brown smoke drifting across the cloudy sky. In the meadow, small figures are scattered in the sun and shade: women in light dresses with parasols, a child, and a couple of people sitting under the trees at right. The sky is a gray-white mass of summer cloud, broken by patches of pale blue. The signature is at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In 1869–70 Monet lived in the western suburbs of Paris, at Saint-Michel near Bougival and then at Louveciennes, a short train ride from the Gare Saint-Lazare. This was the leisure landscape of the new railway age, where Parisians came by train for Sunday walks, boating and bathing. The previous summer he had painted the river resort of La Grenouillère and The Bridge at Bougival nearby. In the summer of 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out and Monet left for London, so this is one of the last pictures of that suburban world before the war.

How it was painted

The picture is made quickly, outdoors, with the broad, flat brushwork Monet developed in these years with Renoir. The meadow is laid in with horizontal strokes of light green, the shadows with darker green over it, without blending. The figures are a few touches each: a white stroke for a dress, a smaller one for a parasol. The train is barely more than a sign. Monet is not interested in the machine but in the way it sits in the landscape, its smoke merging with the clouds.

The train in Monet's work

Railways run through Monet's painting of the 1870s. At Argenteuil he painted trains crossing the river in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil and Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, and a train stopped in snow in Train in the Snow at Argenteuil. In 1877 he went into the station itself and made the Gare Saint-Lazare series. Train in the Countryside is an early, quiet entry in that story: the train as a brief, smoky line across a summer day.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to the department-store owner and collector Ernest Hoschedé, Monet's patron, whose collection was sold after his bankruptcy in the late 1870s. After the Second World War it was among the works recovered from Germany and entrusted to the French national museums under the MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupération) label, pending identification of their pre-war owners; its inventory number is MNR 218. It was on deposit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers from 2004 to 2009 and is now back at the Musée d'Orsay. See our Monet at the Musée d'Orsay page for the museum's other Monets.