Train in the Countryside

Train in the Countryside from 1870 at the Musée d'Orsay is one of Monet's earliest treatments of the railway — a subject he would develop more fully in the Saint-Lazare station series of 1877. The canvas was painted in the spring of 1870, before the Franco-Prussian War that would drive Monet from France in September of that year, and it shows the railway crossing the rural landscape as a symbol of modernity's penetration of the pastoral world. The Impressionists' engagement with railways was fundamentally different from earlier representations of train travel: whereas academic and Romantic painters had depicted trains as sublime or threatening intrusions into nature, Monet and his contemporaries treated them as simply part of the contemporary visual world, no more or less worthy of painting than boats or gardens. Émile Zola's novel La Bête Humaine, published in 1890, would make the railway a symbol of modernity's destructive energy; Monet's earlier railway paintings are more sanguine, the train coexisting with fields and sky as a natural element of modern France.

The locomotive's steam plume creates a dynamic diagonal across the horizontal landscape composition. Monet renders the smoke with loose, gestural strokes of white and grey against the sky. The surrounding fields are broadly painted in warm summer greens and yellows, the train and tracks a dark anchoring element in the horizontal expanse.