An Ekphrastic Look at Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare and Our Recent Amtrak Trip

 

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). Public Domain
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23.7 × 31.6 in). Art Institute of Chicago

Our Amtrak trip from Tucson to Chicago last month was marked by a lulling rhythm-of-the-rails state of mind that allowed us to sleep even when the train whistle hooted all night long. The food is really pretty good and was made even better by the constantly changing views of the countryside that slipped by as we ate. We could see New Mexico skyscapes along the Sunset Limited portion of the trip, and later we had a chance to look over all those Texas towns we’ll never visit during the 24 hours the Texas Eagle spent in its namesake state. The transition from the West, with its calm arid landscapes, to the East with more grass and trees and population density, is always worth commenting on when you wake up 48 hours into the trip and see the Mississippi River and St. Louis’ Gateway Arch.

Of course, along the way, we experienced the frequent, low-level frustration of being kept motionless as freight trains passed our train, leaving it shuddering in the wake of one of Union Pacific’s rude giants. (Amtrak says that for more than 50 years freight railroads have, by law, had to give Amtrak "preference" to run passenger trains ahead of freight trains, but freight lines tend to ignore the law and it's hard for Amtrak to enforce it. This gives the Sunset Limited an on-time performance of only 19%.)

Amtrak in Benson, AZ https://www.flickr.com/photos/petegregoire/, CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We also had a much longer delay just outside Chicago when there was an accident at a poorly marked crossing, and I thought the day-long layover we had set up for ourselves in the Loop might evaporate altogether. That’s why when we finally made it to the Art Institute, and I was standing before “Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare” as a kind of appetizer before I made my way to the room that’s filled with Monets, I enjoyed my fellow-feeling with the artist, who also loved trains, and I felt a little bit superior to him because he loved those dirty steam engines that clouded up the sky, whereas modern diesel trains are much cleaner (and electric trains are even more so). I also now know something about Monet that I didn't know back in the 1960s and 1970s when, feeling privileged to be at the Art Institute, I would stare for hours at all the impressionist treasures I could wrap my gaze around.

Claude Monet, as it turns out, was a connoisseur of the industrial smog of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and London. According to a recent study, the thick smog of the early Industrial Revolution may have inspired Monet (and British painter JMW Turner, whose work was also included in the study) to depict the world, as the title of the ARTnews article about the study has it, as though in a "dreamlike haze." Anna Lea Albright, coauthor of the study, told CNN that, as air pollution levels increased, “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.” Not everyone agrees with this -- Sebastian Smee, art critic at the Washington Post, disagreed with the study's authors that the creation of Impressionism could be explained so simply, but even he doesn't doubt that "Monet was responding to an increasingly polluted environment." 

The painting of Gare Saint-Lazare at the Art Institute is dated 1877, and according to Jean Renoir in his biography of his father, Monet not only worked to emphasize and celebrate smog and fog in his paintings of the station, he even talked the stationmaster into stopping the trains for the best composition and stoking them up so they would produce even more smoke. In spite of the industrial intensity of the scene in this painting, however, the palette is soothing: blue, gray and white predominate, except for the greenish station floor. According to the museum label, this work is darker and less abstract than later works, giving a fairly clear view of the station, the approaching train, the glass-paneled roof and the buildings in the background. Yet there's something cool and dreamy about the scene itself, in spite of the steamy sky and the approach of a gigantic machine, maybe because there's still some space in the foreground from which we watch the train. It’s as though the excitement that Monet must have felt about the huge energy of the train as it moved so many people and barreled its way into the station was outweighed by his appreciation of its beauty. We now know that those steam engines weren’t very good for the environment, and the passengers must have experienced harmful levels of smoke if they sat in cars with open windows. But Monet considered them to be a feast for the eyes, if not for the other senses.

Our own decision to take the train on our trip east this summer had mostly been a matter of convenience, but we also wanted to be more environmentally friendly than we were on last year’s car trip. Was that the case? Greta Thunberg travels by train, which is something of an endorsement, and according to the same BBC article in which I learned about Ms. Thunberg’s travel arrangements, train travel "virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot.” Unfortunately, diesel trains' carbon emissions are as much as two times those of electric trains, and of course Amtrak trains are diesel-powered. But according to the Amtrak website, “rail travel produces up to 83% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than driving and up to 73% fewer emissions than flying, making Amtrak the best option to shrink your travel carbon footprint.” They also say, “According to the 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Data Book, Amtrak is 46% more energy efficient than traveling by car and 34% more energy efficient than domestic air travel.” 

And not only is travel by rail a greener option, it has other benefits as well. We like to read and write and daydream, and a long train trip is a good chance to do all those things. Our trip was a relaxing experience, for the most part, but I admit that I also felt some anxiety on the trip because I know sharing the track with freight trains can have hazardous consequences. Later, while visiting friends in Youngstown, Ohio, we made a brief visit to East Palestine, the site of a Norfolk Southern train derailment, where there was a “controlled” burn of five boxcars of vinyl chloride and the spread of harmful chemicals throughout the area. Six months later, the cleanup is still ongoing, and area residents are still worried about health consequences. (See this opinion piece at The Hill by E. Palestine resident Misti Allison.)

In a recent article at NPR called "After the East Palestine train derailment, are railroads any safer?" Erika Ryan reported that, though there used to be a four-person crew on a freight train, over time, crew members like flagmen were considered unnecessary. The freight industry now wants trains to have one worker on board: an engineer, in spite of the fact that there’s been a move toward longer trains, some of them three miles long and maybe more than 20,000 tons. Ryan also said that the freight industry's business model, known as PSR (precision scheduled railroading), which was meant to make the trains run more efficiently, has resulted in large numbers of layoffs, and, "Freight workers across multiple class I railroad companies have told NPR that nearly every aspect of their job has changed as a result of PSR -- including reductions in time dedicated to locomotive maintenance, inspections and training." As a result, these workers said that derailments like the one that took place in East Palestine were inevitable. And even in East Palestine, there's still lots of freight traffic. At one point when we were there, two behemoth freight trains passed each other, travelling in opposite directions, holding up traffic and making an intense amount of noise.

Railway ticket for the Texas and Pacific Railway. The trains were designated as
"Eagles"--Texas Eagle, etc. Circa 1950s. Public Domain.

The pitch and duration of a train whistle make it a mournful sound, one which we heard many times on our Amtrak trip, and stories about derailments and so-called bomb trains gave anxious overtones to those sounds. It made me even more uneasy to learn that there is only one human being on those freight trains, and that person is charged with making sure nothing goes wrong. How can a small flesh and blood person keep track of three miles of diesel-driven metal, weighing many tons? It is the hubris of the rail companies that makes it possible for them to think this is possible, and each time a huge train raced past our Amtrak train, I thought about how hard that lone engineer’s job must be. As I write this and I look again at an image of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare painting, I remember that, although the train in the painting was a steaming, roaring monster, at least there were enough human beings around to bring it to heel so Monet could paint it as he chose.