While two of the group are highly finished, others are closer to rapidly executed sketches (or esquisses). The pictures display a range of techniques and compositions, and differ both in subject and in their degree of finish. It is not known whether the National Gallery’s picture was among those exhibited. Seven of them were listed among the 30 pictures he submitted to the Impressionist group show in May, although it may be that only six were hung. Monet produced his 12 pictures of the Gare Saint-Lazare during a period of intense activity from January to March 1877. During his stay in London in 1870–1, for example, Monet would have seen Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed at the National Gallery, in which a fiery locomotive hurtles across a rainswept bridge as a hare on the track leaps from its path. Trains were viewed as emblems of modernity both within France and elsewhere. Painted in 1876, it was exhibited in the third Impressionist group show in May 1877. Caillebotte’s paintings include The Pont de l’Europe (Museé du Petit Palais, Geneva), a view of the recently built bridge over the station’s rail tracks. Monet’s friend Gustave Caillebotte was also working on paintings of the Quartier de l’Europe around the Gare Saint-Lazare, perhaps prompting Monet to tackle a similar subject. The station was an obvious example of the city’s newly built structures and had already been painted by Manet in The Railway of 1873 (National Gallery of Art, Washington). This expansion was in response to the demand for rapid transport links across France and to the dramatic growth of Paris itself by 1870, the Gare Saint-Lazare was handling around 11 million suburban passengers every year. It was enlarged 1851–3, following designs by Eugène Flachat, and extended again 1867–8. In late 1871 Monet had also rented a small apartment just a single block from the station’s main entrance. It also served trains to many of the key Impressionist sites west of Paris, including Bougival and Argenteuil, where he had previously lived. He had known the station since childhood as it was the Paris terminal for trains to Normandy, where he grew up. This work is one of a dozen views of the Gare Saint-Lazare that Monet painted in early 1877, after he was granted permission in January to paint the station and its approaches. Trains appeared in several of Monet’s pictures from 1870 onward, but the paintings he made of the Gare Saint-Lazare are his most extensive exploration of railways as a subject.
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