Wednesday 30 September 2009

‘Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train’ – Claude Monet

monet_gare_lazare_ankunft

One of a whole series in and around the same Parisian railway station, in which he aimed to capture through the whole series of vignettes (rather than in one grand composition for which these might have served as a study) the vitality of these new “secular cathedrals” that then symbolised the modern world – a place where Monet could treat the smoke from the grimy locomotives, for example,  the same way a Constable of an earlier era might have treated a pastoral cloud formation.

But a Constable would never have cut off the legs of his foreground figures like that.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Perhaps the man in the foreground is Toulouse-Lautrec.