Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

In the winter of 1877 Claude Monet turned from the open fields to the great iron-and-glass sheds of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and the smoke of the arriving expresses became his most modern subject yet. Of the dozen canvases he made of the station, Arrival of the Normandy Train is the grandest in ambition: the locomotive sweeps in beneath the glass roof trailing a plume of steam, its violet-blue haze catching the flat daylight that falls through the glazing. 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.