Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

Arrival of the Normandy Train, the grandest in ambition of the dozen canvases Claude Monet made of the Gare Saint-Lazare, shows the locomotive sweeping in beneath the glass roof trailing a plume of steam, its violet-blue haze catching the flat daylight that falls through the glazing. In the winter of 1877 he turned from the open fields to the great iron-and-glass sheds of the station, and the smoke of the arriving expresses became his most modern subject yet. Monet, who had just seen his work hung in the second Impressionist exhibition, here dissolved the solid world of iron and masonry into the very air, treating the station as a cathedral of the new age. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.