The train

In the panorama the station, that symbol of the Industrial Revolution, is Saint Lazare, in Paris: a transparent glass roof blackened by fumes, and a black train pulling out with its plume of blue smoke.

Visuel de la fresque (détail)

This is a homage to Claude Monet, in that it takes as its model the station made famous by the series of paintings the latter had executed in 1877. In Le Havre, Monet was the Impressionist to whom the youthful Dufy attached himself before the lesson of Matisse and Fauvism sent him in another direction: “I understood all the new reasons for painting and Impressionist realism lost its charm for me when I contemplated the miracle of the imagination introduced into drawing and colour,” he wrote to Marcelle Oury. He expanded on his reaction in another letter, this time to Marcelle Berr de Turique: “From that day on I simply could not return to the sterile struggles with the elements that offered themselves to my sight. There was no longer any question of representing these elements in their external form.”

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