The iron-and-glass cathedral of modern Paris

To understand why Claude Monet (1840–1926) pointed his easel at a train station in 1877, you have to know what the Gare Saint-Lazare was — what a gareeven is — and you have to know that for Monet, of all the painters in Paris, this particular building was personal.

Gare is just the French word for railway station. Saint-Lazare was the saint the neighborhood was named after; the station took his name from the street outside. And in 1877 it was the busiest railway station in Paris — the terminus, meaning the end-of-the-line stop, for trains running west out of the capital toward the Channel coast. The trains that pulled in and out of it every day went to Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Chatou, Bougival — sleepy Seine-side suburbs an hour from Paris — and on to Le Havre, the big port on the Normandy coast where Monet grew up. Those names matter, because those were Monet’s places. He had lived in Argenteuil. He had painted the river at Chatou. He had walked the docks at Le Havre as a boy. For a decade he had taken the train through this station, constantly, in and out, week after week. So when he picked the Gare Saint-Lazare as a subject, he wasn’t being a tourist of modern Paris from the outside. He was painting the doorway in and out of his own life.

Then there was what the building actually looked like. To get this you have to know about something that didn’t exist a generation earlier: the iron-and-glass train shed. A train shed is the giant roofed hall a station throws over the tracks where the engines pull up — the room you walk into when you step off the platform and look up. Until about 1850, big roofs were built the way they’d been built since the Romans: thick stone walls and heavy beams, with smallish windows. Then engineers figured out you could cast iron in long, thin, immensely strong shapes — beams and ribs and trusses — and slot huge sheets of plate glass between them, and suddenly you could make a roof that was mostly air and light. You could span an enormous space with what looked like a delicate metal skeleton holding up a glass sky.

This was the new architecture of the age. London had the Crystal Palace (1851), the giant glass exhibition hall everyone had marveled at. Paris had Les Halles, the great central food market, built in cast iron and glass through the 1850s and 60s. The Gare du Nord, the city’s other big station, got an iron-and-glass shed in 1864. And Saint-Lazare had been rebuilt with one too, by an engineer named Eugène Flachat, in the early 1850s, then expanded a decade later. To stand inside the shed in 1877 was to stand inside the most contemporary building shape on the planet — a triangular hall of dark iron girders and pale dirty glass, with locomotives breathing steam underneath it. (A locomotive is the engine car of a train, the part that does the pulling. In 1877 they ran on coal and water; they made steam, and the steam shot up through the smokestack on top in white plumes whenever the engine was working.)

A respectable painter of 1877 would not have thought any of this was a serious subject. The traditional categories of painting — what the official art schools called proper subjects — were noble landscapes, religious scenes, history pictures, and elegant portraits. A coal-fired industrial machine inside a metal warehouse was a picture of modern Paris, which to most critics meant a picture of something embarrassing, the sort of thing you walked past on the way to something prettier. The Salon — the state’s annual art exhibition, the official gatekeeper of careers — did not hang train stations.

But a small camp had been arguing for years that this was exactly the failure of official art: that it kept painting an imaginary past while the present was being built around it. The poet Charles Baudelaire, in an 1863 essay called The Painter of Modern Life, had laid down the program in plain words — the real job of the painter, he said, was to catch the heroism and beauty of the present, the actual street and traffic and weather of one’s own time, not to keep re-staging antiquity. The painter Édouard Manet had taken him at his word and started painting the contemporary city — bars, racetracks, sidewalks. In 1873 Manet had even painted a railway scene (called, simply, The Railway) — a young woman seated on a Paris bench beside a railing, behind which a great white cloud of locomotive steam billowed up from a hidden train. Manet had hidden the train and shown the steam. He had handed Monet a permission slip.

(And the truly old precedent was older still: across the Channel, the English painter J. M. W. Turner had painted Rain, Steam and Speedin 1844 — a train hurtling out of misty rain over a viaduct, the locomotive itself almost dissolved into colored weather. Monet was not the first painter of railways. He never claimed to be. What he was about to do was different — and you have to know the lineage to see what was new.)

So here was the situation Monet was looking at in early 1877: the busiest station in Paris, the gateway in and out of his own working life, was a building made out of the newest architecture, full of the newest machinery, breathing exactly the kind of soft moving atmosphere — steam, smoke, weak light through dirty glass — that he had spent ten years learning to paint on the Seine. The match was almost too perfect. The only question was whether they’d let him inside.