Pont de l'Europe, gare Saint-Lazare

In the first months of 1877 Monet set up not in a field but under the great iron-and-glass shed of the Saint-Lazare station in Paris, and painted the trains. He worked fast, turning out 12 canvases in about four months, shifting his spot each time: inside the shed, out on the tracks, and here beneath the road bridge called the Pont de l'Europe, where the angle squeezes the engines and their steam into a grey billowing wall. The railway was still a fairly new thing to treat as a serious subject for painting. Monet showed seven of the 12 that spring at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris.