La Gare Saint-Lazare

La Gare Saint-Lazare is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet, made in 1877 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 2775); it is one of twelve views of the Paris railway terminus he painted that year.

In January 1877 Monet moved close to the Gare Saint-Lazare and obtained permission from the director of the Compagnie des Chemins de fer de l'Ouest to set up his easel inside it. Working on the concourse and beside the tracks, he completed the twelve canvases in roughly four months, finishing them in the studio. The group is regarded as his first series devoted to a single motif, a method he later pursued with haystacks and water lilies.

This canvas, 75.5 by 105 cm, was painted from the platform of the Auteuil line under the great glass shed that the engineer Eugène Flachat built over the suburban side of the station in 1853. The pitched roof frames a symmetrical view: a dark locomotive arrives at the centre trailing clouds of steam, another train heads towards the Pont de l'Europe, a single carriage stands idle on the left, and sunlit apartment blocks of the new Europe district fill the background. Steam and smoke blur the iron framework and the figures, letting Monet treat the station as a place of constant movement and changing light.

Monet showed this picture with six other station views at the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877, where many critics praised how he conveyed the bustle, colour and noise of the place. On 10 March 1878 he sold it to his fellow painter Gustave Caillebotte, who kept it until his death in 1894; it then entered the French national collections as part of the Caillebotte bequest. Other versions of the subject are held by the National Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fogg Museum and the Musée Marmottan Monet.