Motif of trains is much more than just an Impressionistic fancy. There is no visible train only the white cloud of steam indicates its presence. It was a spot painted by fellow Impressionists such as Gustave Caillebotte and Claude Monet, but Manet approached the subject quite differently. The setting includes the train station in Paris called Gare Saint-Lazare. Large brushstrokes of solid black are spread across the canvas, dominating the background. We can’t see her face, thought she appears to be amused by the train passing by, clutching the iron grating like a restless captive bars of its cage. Her black hair ribbon matches the one her nanny is wearing around her neck. Model for the little girl was a daughter of Manet’s friend Alphonse Hirsch. Next to her stands a little girl in white dress with large blue bow. She seems to have been reading that book, but something distracted her. There’s a sleeping puppy in her lap, a closed fan and a book. She is dressed in a navy gown with wide pagoda sleeves typical fashion of the time. In this painting she posed as a nanny and her piercing gaze is evident as well, though she seems a bit distant, her eyes sad and tired. She appeared in many of his paintings, most notably the two already mentioned above: Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass. The first thing you’ll notice about this painting is the straightforward gaze on the face of this rosy-cheeked and red haired woman, modeled by Manet’s favourite model, Victorine Meurent. In return, Baudelaire praised Manet in times when art critics were still enraged by his paintings Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted parties and dance scenes, Claude Monet painted bridges, trains and seasides, Pissaro painted boulevards, Gustave Caillebotte the streets of Paris, but it was the radical young artist called Edouard Manet who beautifully captured Baudelaire’s ideas. Baudelaire’s ideas came to life through the brushstrokes of Impressionists. (his quote: ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.‘) Baudelaire argued that art should capture the modern life, both its glamour and bleakness, with a constant awareness of its transience. The interplay of flatness and depth is one of Manet’s most daring innovations, inspired perhaps by his growing familiarity with Japanese woodblock prints.This painting perfectly embodies Charles Baudelaire’s idea of ‘modernity’. Not only does it elevate the figure to a level slightly higher than the girl, it also neatly emphasizes the flatness of the picture plane, an effect enhanced further of course by the iron railings. The black hat is a clever device, tilted forwards as was the fashion and held in place with a tie-back bow. In her lap a puppy doses, the child’s pet perhaps, the red fan behind it finding echoes in the flowers in her hat, the girl’s pendant earring and the rail worker’s shirt to the left. Here she exudes a sense of middle-class propriety, fashionably dressed in a deep blue dress with large, light blue buttons, wide cuffs and collars. Torii Kiyonaga, "The Ninth Month" from the series The Twelve Months in the Southern District, 1784, Woodblock PrintThe model is Victorine Meurent, Manet’s muse of the 1860’s who posed for both Olympia and the nude figure in Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.
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