The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train

In 1877 Monet was living out at Argenteuil and coming into Paris by train, and he asked for permission to set up his easel inside the Gare Saint-Lazare, the station that fed the western suburbs. Painters were meant to look for their subjects in gardens and riverbanks, not under an iron-and-glass shed full of smoke; Monet made a whole series of the place, and showed several at the third Impressionist exhibition that spring. Here a locomotive pulls in and its steam rises straight up into the glazed roof, half dissolving the engine, the platform and the waiting figures into the same grey light. What holds the picture together is not the machine but that vapour, the one thing in the scene that never stops moving.