Gare Saint Lazare

Beneath the great iron-and-glass roof of the Gare Saint-Lazare, locomotives belch billowing clouds of white steam that rise to dissolve the station and the city beyond into a haze of light and vapor. Monet, fascinated by this temple of modern travel, set up his easel inside and painted a whole series of the shed. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, the Gare Saint-Lazare shows Impressionism embracing the industrial age - smoke, steam, and steel made the vehicle for his lifelong study of atmosphere, the throbbing machinery of the railway dissolved into shimmering light.