The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20250312212914/https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/manet-the-railway.html
Skip to Main Content
Home>Collection>Collection Highlights>Edouard Manet, The Railway, 1873

The Railway

Edouard Manet

M. Manet, whose summary methods may appear brutal at times...seems concerned above all to express modern life exactly as it is and to free his art from technical conventions.

Ernest Chesneau, "Le Salon sentimental. XII. L’Art et la vie parisienne"

With her back to us, a young girl stands looking through a fence. Facing us directly, a woman sits with a small dog in her lap and a book in her hand. Billowing steam from an unseen train obscures the center background, but the edge of a bridge juts out at right, identifying the setting as Gare Saint-Lazare—Paris’ busiest train station and emblem of the city’s unsettling 19th-century makeover.

Beyond depicting the modern city, The Railway disturbingly suggests how people experienced it. Pinned against a long black iron fence, these fashionably dressed female figures are physically cut off from the railroad beyond and also seem estranged from each other: facing in opposite directions, they are absorbed in their individual activities. Manet offers us no clues to their relationship, even as we viewers seem to interrupt the woman reading. She looks up at us directly with an expression that is neutral and guarded—the characteristic regard of one stranger encountering another in the modern metropolis.

Most critics fumed at what they called Manet’s trivial and inscrutable subject matter (as well as his strident colors, loose brush work, and trademark flatly painted forms). Few recognized that with its discomfiting mix of immediacy, psychological detachment, and indefinite narrative, The Railway represented the way Paris’ urban renewal program, of which railroads were a centerpiece, had destabilized social relations in the city. 

About the Artist

Édouard Manet, 1867

Henri Fantin-Latour, Édouard Manet, 1867. Art Institute of Chicago.

Born in Paris to a wealthy family, Édouard Manet showed promise in drawing and caricature from an early age. After twice being denied admission to France’s prestigious Naval College, he enrolled in 1850 at the studio of academic artist Thomas Couture. While copying paintings at the Louvre, Manet became attracted to the bold brushwork of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. He soon adopted a free manner of painting that opposed the polished surfaces revered by academic artists. Rather than gradually building up a composition with layers of blended pigments and translucent glazes, Manet selected and applied patches of color side by side, from the start, for their final effect.

Against a hilly landscape and on a patch of dirt, five people wearing tattered clothing gather around a bearded man who holds a violin in his lap in this horizontal painting. Most of them have pale skin. Starting from the left is a barefoot young woman holding a blond baby to her chest. She faces our right, and her chestnut-brown hair hides her profile. She wears a black shirt over a calf-length skirt streaked with slate and aquamarine blue. To the right two young boys face us. The boy on the left of that pair wears a loose white shirt tucked into tan-colored pants and an upturned wide-brimmed hat. The boy next to him has short brown hair and is dressed in a black and brown vest and pants over a bone-white shirt. His right arm, to our left, is slung across the shoulders of the blond boy and he looks off to our right with dark, unfocused eyes. The man who holds the violin is to our right of center. He sits on a stone with his body facing our left, but he turns to look at us with dark eyes under heavy brows. He has tan skin, dark gray, curly hair, and a trimmed silvery gray beard. A wrinkle under one eye suggests he may smile slightly at us. He wears a loose brown cloak with a ragged bottom hem, teal-blue stockings, and black shoes. He holds a violin on his lap like a guitar. One hand fingers a chord on the neck of the violin, which comes toward us, and the other hand holds the bow and plucks a string. A sand-colored bag with a strap lies at his feet. Two men stand to our right of the musician. One wears a tall black top hat, a brown cloak, gray pants, and black shoes. His face is loosely and indistinctly painted but he has a beard. Finally, the sixth person is a man who stands along the right side of the painting and is cut off by that edge. He wears a turban, a black polka-dotted scarf, and a long black cloak or coat. One hand clutches the scarf and the other rests on a wooden cane by his side. His chin and long, light-colored beard tuck back against the scarf, and he looks off to our left with dark eyes. There are loosely painted olive and forest-green leaves in the upper left corner. The landscape beyond is painted with indistinct areas of muted green, blue, and brown. Bits of azure-blue sky peek through puffy white and gray clouds overhead. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “ed. Manet 1862.”

Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.162

Manet set out on his own artistic career in 1856. Soon after, his focus on modern subject matter—street scenes, bar life, and backhanded versions of famous art icons—coupled with his unconventional paint handling, regularly provoked critics’ wrath. Olympia, a painting of a naked courtesan who frankly engages the viewer in parody of the classic Venus, triggered an unparalleled scandal when it was exhibited at the 1865 Salon. The uproar made Manet the de facto leader of the avant-garde. 

Related Resources

Artist Information
Edouard Manet

Online Tour
Impressionism

Teaching Resource
Picturing France, 1830–1900

Image Download
Download a digital image of this work

To our left, a young woman sits facing us on a low stone wall at the base of the vertical, black bars of an iron fence and a young girl stands facing away from us to our right in this horizontal painting. Both have pale skin. The woman looks directly at us with dark eyes as she holds an open book, a closed red fan, and a sleeping brown and white puppy in her lap. Her long auburn hair falls down over her shoulders. Her navy-blue dress is accented with white piping on the skirt, collar, and sleeves, and has three large, white buttons down the front and her black hat is adorned with two red poppies and a daisy. The girl wears a sleeveless white, knee-length dress belted with a marine-blue sash tied in a large bow at her back. The girl’s blond hair is pulled up and tied with a black ribbon. She raises her left hand to grasp the bar of the fence she faces. A bunch of green grapes lies on the low wall to our right. A plume of steam fills much of the space beyond the black fence, which spans the width of the painting and extends off the top edge. A few details can be made out beyond the fence, including a stone-gray building with two wooden doors to our left and a bridge along the right edge.

Edouard Manet, The Railway, 1873, oil on canvas, Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer, 1956.10.1

Manet’s bold style, contemporary subject matter, and determination to challenge entrenched academic models influenced younger artists who would come to be known as the impressionists. Manet, too, learned from them, lightening his palette and using even freer brushwork. But he did not share the impressionists’ spontaneity; the striking immediacy of Manet’s greatest works resulted from a deliberate process involving drawing, models, and painting in a studio. Still determined to make his mark in the official Salon, he declined the more radical option of exhibiting with the impressionists.

Manet continued producing enigmatic and inventive paintings about urban life until his death in 1883. While he had gained a reputation as an influential innovator, only posthumously would he be recognized as a father of modern art.

 


 

Related Works in the Collection

Edouard Manet, The Railway Restaurant, c. 1879, pen and brown ink on wove paper laid down, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 2006.128.25

A densely packed crowd of men and women, all of them with pale skin and most of them wearing black, stand in a theater lobby beneath a mezzanine level that runs close to the top edge of the composition in this horizontal painting. Because the crowd spans the width of the composition, the first impression is of a mass of deep black stretching across the canvas. Slowly, individual faces and poses become evident. Five of the women wear black, oval masks that cover their eyes and noses, and one more mask has fallen onto the rust-red floor below. Two women, wearing bright white and colorful clothing, engage some of the men in conversation. A man cropped by the left edge of the painting wears the green, red, and gold costume and pointed cap of a court jester. Two gold and glass wall sconces hang on the cream-colored wall behind the crowd, one near each top corner. The space within the mezzanine level above is painted loosely so details are difficult to make out, but a pair of legs clad in black britches and white stockings seems to stand with ankles crossed at the top center. A leg wearing a red, high-heeled ankle boot dangles outside of the railing to the right. The brushstrokes are loose throughout. The artist’s signature appears on a piece of discarded paper on the floor near the lower right corner: “Manet.”

Edouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873, oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Horace Havemeyer in memory of her mother-in-law, Louisine W. Havemeyer, 1982.75.1

Dozens of pale-skinned men and women, mostly wearing black and charcoal gray, walk or ride in horse-drawn carriages through a busy street lined with buildings in this vertical painting. Most of the people are men, and most of them wear thigh- or knee-high coats and black top hats. A few wear navy blue, brown, or gray, but most are in black. The few women wear long skirts under tight, narrow-waisted bodices, gloves, and hats. The person closest to us, to our left of center, is a woman in a midnight-blue jacket, brown gloves, and a black hat. She holds two round hat boxes, one white and one black, in one hand with a closed umbrella tucked into that elbow. With her other hand she holds up her skirt to reveal a cascade of a white petticoat over a touch of sky-blue stocking within a black shoe. Pink flowers and green leaves, like a narrow corsage, is affixed to the front center of her jacket. Other people carry umbrellas, packages, boxes, or travel cases. The street surface is tan streaked with some touches of smoke gray. A streetlamp a short distance from us, to our left of center, has a central lantern above four more lanterns emanating from the central pole like the arms of a candelabra. The streetlamp sits on tall pedestal surrounded by a curb. The row of buildings lining the streets is closest to us to our right, and it extends into the distance as it angles to our left. Then, along the left edge of the painting, another row of buildings cuts across the street and encloses our view. On the street corner closest to us, posters in shades of butter yellow, white, topaz blue, brown, and red are plastered over a storefront that curves around a corner to our right. A long sign runs across the top of the storefront with white letters against a pale blue background. It reads, “GRANDS MAGASINS DU PRINTEMPS GRANDS ENTRÉE.” Above it a sign reads “Le” and “8 Boul” before being cut off by the right edge of the composition. Scaffolding above the signs is covered with cloths in pale laurel green and parchment brown. Buildings in oatmeal-brown stone with gray roofs extend into the distance to our left. The building facing us far down the street has arched openings along the ground level beneath two stories of windows. The sky in the upper left quadrant is painted with blended strokes of light, arctic blue and white. The artist signed the painting near the lower right corner, “Jean Beraud.”

Jean Béraud, Paris, rue du Havre, c. 1882, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.2

Explore all Collection Highlights