El tren en el campo

Around 1870 the western suburbs of Paris were being reorganised by the train timetable. A clerk could live under trees half an hour out, and on Sundays the same trees filled with people who had come from the city for the day. Monet painted one of those embankments with the carriages sliding along the top of it, and the odd decision is that the locomotive stays hidden behind the leaves, announced only by its smoke. Down in the shade the walkers with parasols carry on as if nothing were going past. He painted it four years before the group show that got him and his friends called Impressionists, and the picture soon belonged to Ernest Hoschede, a Paris businessman who bought heavily from them and went bankrupt in 1877.