The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train

This is the largest in Monet’s series of twelve paintings of the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris, a subject favored by many impressionist painters. While completing the series, Monet relocated from the town of Argenteuil to an apartment near the station in Paris. He worked on all the paintings at the same time, and sometimes he leaned the stretched canvases against each other while the paint was still wet. This caused the cork spacers on the backs of the stretchers to be pressed into the adjacent paintings, creating circular indentations in the surface that are visible along the top edge of this work. Monet’s thick build-up of pigments here is a virtuosic example of his approach to painting during this period, when he juxtaposed multitudinous hues in mounds of impasto that would blend into a coherent whole only when viewed from a distance. This technique reportedly led Cézanne to declare, “Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!”