Train en gare

Train en gare, at La Piscine in Roubaix, is one of Dufy's railway paintings from around 1935, in which the locomotive and station architecture become occasions for his characteristic treatment of modern technology as spectacle. Trains had attracted painters since Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, and Dufy's cheerful, decorative approach to the subject stands in pointed contrast to the drama Turner sought. The La Piscine museum, housed in a converted public swimming pool in Roubaix, holds a significant collection of twentieth-century French art.

Dufy renders the locomotive with his characteristic drawn line over colour wash — the machine's mechanical detail indicated by economical notation rather than technical precision. Steam and atmospheric effects are conveyed through loose washes of grey-blue that blur the station's architectural clarity, appropriate to the hazy, smoky environment of a working railway terminus.