Saint-Lazare Station, the Normandy Train - Monet Postcard

Saint-Lazare Station, the Normandy Train - When he returned to Argenteuil at the end of 1876, all Monet could think of was his new subject: the Gare Saint-Lazare. So he decided to move nearby, to a place where he could both receive his clients and, more importantly, that would act as a base for his plan to paint around Saint-Lazare. In this work, he represents the part used for main line routes, notably the Normandy train, thus depicting a station that connected to most of the main Impressionist locations. The Gare Saint-Lazare then became a symbol of progress in the eyes of his contemporaries, and engines with tall funnels became the latest fashionable subject. On this point, Zola remarked: 'That is where painting is today … Our artists have to find poetry in railway stations, as their fathers did in the forests and rivers.' Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).