The Railway

Edouard Manet
French, 1832 - 1883
The Railway, 1873
oil on canvas, 93.3 x 111.5 cm (36 3/4 x 45 1/8 in.)
Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer
1956.10.1

National Gallery of Art Brief Guide

The Gare Saint-Lazare, in 1873 the largest and busiest train station in Paris, is unseen in this painting. Advances in industrial technology and train travel, intrinsic to most contemporary depictions of the site, are in Manet's painting the almost invisible background for a genre depiction of a woman and child. Confined to a narrow space backed by the black bars of an iron fence and isolated by clouds of steam sent up from a train passing below, Manet's two models are inactive and enigmatic presences. The woman is Victorine Meurent, Manet's favorite model in the 1860s, and the child was the daughter of the painter friend who allowed Manet to use his garden to paint Gare Saint-Lazare. The composition is a complex contrapuntal apposition of the two figures: one clad in a white dress trimmed with blue bow and the other dressed in dark blue trimmed with white, one with hair bound by a narrow black ribbon and the other with flowing tresses under a black hat, one a child standing and looking to anonymous trains and buildings in the background and the other a seated adult staring forward to confront viewers directly.

As the impressionists were opening their first exhibition, Manet was instead preparing for the 1874 Salon. Of the four works he submitted to the jury only two were accepted, Gare Saint-Lazare and a watercolor. Critical of the painting's unfinished appearance and disturbed by its title, reviewers nonetheless identified Manet as leader of the impressionists.