Train in the Snow (The Locomotive)

Train in the Snow, also called The Locomotive, is one of the snow pictures Claude Monet painted at Argenteuil during the winter of 1874–75. A black steam engine with two glowing yellow lamps and a red buffer beam comes toward us along the track at the town's station, its smoke rising in a great gray-violet plume into a snowy sky. Signed and dated 75 at lower right, it is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

What you're looking at

The track runs in from the left, and the train sits on it slightly left of center, seen almost head-on. The locomotive is a dark, blue-black block, the boiler and cab merging into the carriages behind. On its front two round lamps burn yellow and orange, and the red of the buffer beam glows beneath them, the only warm colors in the picture. Smoke pours from the tall chimney and fills the upper left quarter of the canvas in rolling clouds of gray, white and mauve.

To the right, a wooden fence slants away from the bottom edge toward the distance, separating the line from a snowy path. Beside it a row of young, bare trees, their thin branches drawn in gray and rust, leads the eye back along the platform. A man in a dark coat and hat stands near the engine, perhaps a railway worker, and a few more figures appear further along. Near the vanishing point, a signal post and a yellow light mark the far end of the station. At left, past the track, are the dim shapes of station buildings, half lost in the snowy air. Everything is coated in grayish snow, and the sky is low and heavy.

Argenteuil, winter 1874–75

Monet lived at Argenteuil from 1871 to 1878, and in 1874 he moved to a house on the boulevard Saint-Denis, close to the station. The railway gave Argenteuil its quick link to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris and was part of everyday life there. That winter brought heavy snow, and Monet painted at least eighteen snow scenes of the town, including Snow Scene at Argenteuil and Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter. Another snowy railway view, Train in the Snow at Argenteuil, shows a train crossing open country outside the town.

Trains appear throughout Monet's Argenteuil work, as in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil, and they lead to his famous series of twelve canvases of the Paris terminus in 1877; see the Gare Saint-Lazare series. For the town as a whole, see Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The picture is built on strong diagonals: the track, the fence and the row of trees all run toward the same point, giving a sense of depth and of the train's approach even though it may be standing still. Within that structure, Monet keeps the forms soft. The train dissolves into the snowy air, and the smoke and sky are painted in loose, swirling strokes of grays and violets. Late in the work he added vigorous touches on the snow and fence that sit on the surface, along with his dark signature.

The color is almost monochrome, which makes the small points of yellow and red very strong. Scholars have compared the image of the engine's lamps reddening the snow with a scene of a train in a snowstorm in Émile Zola's novel La Bête humaine, written much later. Zola knew and praised Monet's railway paintings.

De Bellio and the Marmottan

The painting was bought from Monet by Georges de Bellio, a Romanian-born doctor in Paris and one of the earliest collectors of Impressionism. He lent it to Monet's exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1883. His daughter Victorine and her husband, Eugène Donop de Monchy, gave it to the Musée Marmottan in 1940, along with Impression, Sunrise. It hangs there today among the world's largest collection of Monet paintings; see Musée Marmottan Monet.