The Railway

When Edouard Manet unveiled this painting in 1873, people were genuinely puzzled. The title promised a railway, yet the train is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a cloud of white steam billows up behind an iron fence at the Saint-Lazare station in Paris. A young woman sits in the foreground with an open book and a sleepy little dog in her lap, gazing straight at us, while a small girl in a white dress turns her back to watch the steam through the bars. The model for the woman was Victorine Meurent, who appeared in many of Manet's works.

The strange thing is that these two figures never seem to connect. One faces outward, the other looks away, and there is no tidy story linking them together. That was exactly the point. Manet was fascinated by ordinary moments in the growing, industrial city, and he chose to paint a passing instant rather than a polished scene with a clear meaning. His loose, quick brushwork and the hidden train left early critics scratching their heads, but that sense of a real slice of modern life is what makes the picture feel so fresh even now.