In Gare Saint-Lazare (Monet series), how is the Creation discussed?
In the 1870s, Monet rented a studio not far from the Gare Saint-Lazare and gained permission from the director of the Compagnie des Chemins de fer de l'Ouest to paint from the station concourse and beside the track.Painting on site, Monet had to deal with the incoming and outgoing trains and crowds of passengers. When he sketched and started painting, his view must have been blocked by steam and smoke. In 1889, critic Hugues Le Roux recalled Monet's working process in the Gare Saint-Lazare:  “[Monet] was doggedly painting the departing locomotives. He wanted to show how they looked as they moved through the hot air that shimmered around them. Though the station workers were in his way, he sat there patiently, like a hunter, brush at the ready, waiting for the minute when he could put paint to canvas."Similar to most contemporary artists, Monet did not paint entirely in the station: all of the paintings were finished in his studio. Due to the handful of preliminary sketches Monet did for this series, we can surmise that he did not have an abundant window of time at the station. Monet sketched first and then transferred some of the drawing features onto the under layers of the paintings. Conservator Kirk Vuillemot studied the version from Art Institute of Chicago and found that the painting consisted of two layers and was built up from a broadly applied lay-in. Monet developed the main compositional elements wet-on-wet after the under layers had dried. He created a varied surface texture by juxtaposing multifarious brushstrokes. Vuillemot described the resulting effect as “smooth, fluid paint and low impasto, and lightly dragged and dry-brush strokes that skip across the surface of the painting.”Monet started this series in early January 1877 and exhibited seven of the pictures at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in same year on April 5. He finished twelve paintings in roughly four months.
Art Institute of Chicago Hugues Le Roux locomotive Impressionist Chicago Compagnie des Chemins de fer de l'Ouest Chemins de fer de l'Ouest wet-on-wet Gare Saint-Lazare