The Gare Saint-Lazare (English: St Lazarus station), officially Paris-Saint-Lazare, is one of the six large mainline railway station termini in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

. It serves train services toward

Normandy Normandy (; french: link=no, Normandie ; nrf, Normaundie, Nouormandie ; from Old French , plural of ''Normant'', originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages) is a geographical and cultural region in Northwestern ...

, northwest of Paris, along the

Paris–Le Havre railway The Paris–Le Havre railway is an important 228-kilometre long railway line, that connects Paris to the northwestern port city Le Havre via Rouen. Among the first railway lines in France, the section from Paris to Rouen opened on 9 May 1843, fol ...

. Saint-Lazare is the third busiest station in France, after the Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon. It handles 290,000 passengers each day. The station was designed by architect

Juste Lisch Jean Juste Gustave Lisch (10 June 1828 – 24 August 1910) was a French architect.Eugène Flachat.

History

Victor Hubert - Paris-Saint Germain Railway 1837

The first station at Saint Lazare was 200 metres northwest of its current position, called ''Embarcadère des Batignolles''. The station was opened by Marie-Amélie (wife of

Louis-Philippe of France Louis Philippe (6 October 1773 – 26 August 1850) was King of the French from 1830 to 1848, and the penultimate monarch of France. As Louis Philippe, Duke of Chartres, he distinguished himself commanding troops during the Revolutionary Wa ...

) on 24 August 1837. The first line served was the single track line to Le Pecq. In 1843 St-Lazare was the terminus for three lines; by 1900 this number had tripled. The station had 14 platforms in 1854 after several enlargements, and now has 27 platforms sorted in six destination groups. On 27 April 1924 the inner suburban lines were electrified with 750 V

third rail A third rail, also known as a live rail, electric rail or conductor rail, is a method of providing electric power to a railway locomotive or train, through a semi-continuous rigid conductor placed alongside or between the rails of a railway ...

. The same lines were re-electrified at 25 kV overhead wires in the 1960s. On 21 March 2012, a new three-level shopping mall with 80 shops opened inside the passenger hall.

Geography

The Gare Saint-Lazare is situated in the 8th arrondissement, in a very dense business and shopping area of Paris. *

Gare Saint-Lazare in art and literature

Edouard Manet - Le Chemin de fer - Google Art Project

The Gare Saint-Lazare has been represented in a number of artworks. It attracted artists during the Impressionist period and many of them lived very close to the Gare St-Lazare during the 1870s and 1880s.

Édouard Manet Édouard Manet (, ; ; 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Bor ...

lived close by, at 4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Two years after moving to the area he showed his painting ''

The Railway ''The Railway'', widely known as ''Gare Saint-Lazare'', is an 1873 painting by Édouard Manet. It is the last painting by Manet of his favourite model, the fellow painter Victorine Meurent, who was also the model for his earlier works '' Olympia ...

'', (also known as ''Gare Saint-Lazare'') at the Paris Salon in 1874. Painted from the backyard of a friend's house on the nearby rue de Rome, this canvas, now in the National Gallery of Art at Washington D.C., portrays a woman with a small dog and a book as she sits facing us in front of an iron fence; a young girl to her left views the railroad track and steam beyond it. At the time of its first exhibition it was caricatured and the subject of ridicule.

Gustave Caillebotte Gustave Caillebotte (; 19 August 1848 – 21 February 1894) was a French painter who was a member and patron of the Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was known for his early ...

also lived just a short walk away from the station. He painted ''

Le Pont de l’Europe ''Le Pont de l'Europe'' (English title: ''The Europe Bridge'') is an oil painting by French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte completed in 1876. It is held by the in Geneva, Switzerland. The finished canvas measures . Description The image ...

'' (The Bridge of Europe) in 1876 (now in the Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne in Geneva, Switzerland) and ''On the Pont de l'Europe'' in 1876-80 (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth). While the former picture looks across the bridge with the ironworks diagonally crossing the picture to the right, with a scene of partially interacting figures on the bridge to the left, the latter depicts the iron structure of the bridge face-on in a strong close-up of its industrial geometry, with three male figures to the left side of the painting all looking in different directions (the Pont de l'Europe is a massive bridge spanning the railyard of the newly expanded station, which at that time had an iron-work trellis). Claude Monet 003

In 1877, painter

Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...

rented a studio near the Gare Saint Lazare. That same year he exhibited seven paintings of the railway station in an impressionist painting exhibition. He completed 12 paintings of this subject.
dead link --> Oscar-Claude Monet's series of the Gare Saint-Lazare train station was one of his most famous series in his lifetime. Monet was one of the most important and influential painters in the Impressionist movement in the 19th century. He was a strong proponent of plein-air landscape painting. Artists such as

, Edgar Degas and

Berthe Morisot Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (; January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895) was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly e ...

, do this in order to accurately portray the scene in the moment instead of creating the painting from what they could remember. Monet and others who followed the

Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passa ...

Movement were not accepted in the

Salon de Paris The Salon (french: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: ''Salon de Paris'' ), beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art ...

, because of their rejection of the academies' teachings of form, style, subject matter etc., so instead they decided to open a new exhibition on their own Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874.

's depiction of this train station is an astonishing composition in which the hard-edged discs of the railroad signals hover above a rapidly scribbled swirl of blue and rose clouds of steam, with scrolled white edges, while the sketchy, angular drawing of the tracks and buildings provides contrast. The flat, opaque circle of the largest signal, placed dead center and thickly painted, is so insistent that it turns the picture into a near-abstraction. The ''Gare Saint-Lazare'' piece was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. The Gare Saint-Lazare is very different from Monet's previous paintings of harbors, boats and oceans that viewers had seen before. The ''Gare Saint-Lazare'' series of paintings lead the viewers through a tour of the train station in different points of the day. "Monet exemplifies the modern life, in all its chaos and instability", The steam coming from the trains creates a way of dissolving the train and showing the impressionistic style of blending colors and light. Everything dissipates with the steam of the train and turns into a flurry of blended colors. As said by Émile Zola, "Monet is able to turn a normally dirty and gritty place into a peaceful and beautiful scene…You can hear the trains rumbling in, see the smoke billow up under the huge roofs…that is where painting is today…our artists have to find the poetry in train station, the way their fathers found the poetry in forests and rivers". "Monet’s work on the Gare Saint-Lazare is unparalleled in its evocation of steam and the smoke-filled station. In spite of the impressionist style, the work reproduces accurately the topography of the area, even allowing one to deduce the precise point where the artist was standing while painting. This is the first time an artist had showed a single theme through a series of variations" The Gare Saint-Lazare itself, a monument to the last word in state-of-the-art transportation, the railroad.

Le Quartier Le Quartier () is a commune in the Puy-de-Dôme department in Auvergne in central France. See also *Communes of the Puy-de-Dôme department The following is a list of the 464 communes of the Puy-de-Dôme department of France. Intercommunalit ...

de l'Europe, where artists like

and

spent a lot of time and painted was, in short, a paradigm of modern Paris; the forward-looking young artists who called it home, and who had consciously dedicated themselves to the interpretation of modern life, included in their work recognizable references to their neighborhood as a sign of both their commitment to the present, with all its irregularities and "unaesthetic" components, and their rejection of the past, with its Academy-sanctioned conventions. Lesser-known artists who depicted the Gare Saint Lazare were

Jean Béraud Jean Béraud (; January 12, 1849 – October 4, 1935) was a French painter renowned for his numerous paintings depicting the life of Paris, and the nightlife of Paris society. Pictures of the Champs Elysees, cafés, Montmartre and the banks of ...

, who painted ''The Place and Pont de l'Europe'' in 1876-78 and Norbert Goeneutte (1854–1894), with a studio providing a very good view of the Pont de l'Europe, who painted this scene many times in the late 1880s. One of these is ''The Pont de l'Europe and Gare Saint-Lazare'' from circa 1888 (in the Baltimore Museum). An engraving showing the Place de l'Europe bridge at the time of its opening in 1868 was made by Auguste Lamy. In 1932, the wasteland behind the station became the subject of one of the most celebrated photographs of all time,

Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as ca ...

's ''Derrière la gare de Saint-Lazare''. In

Raymond Queneau Raymond Queneau (; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo ('' Ouvroir de littérature potentielle''), notable for his wit and cynical humour. Biography Queneau w ...

's 1947 book '' Exercises in Style'', the Gare Saint-Lazare serves as the backdrop to much of the story's action. In 1998 the Musée d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., put on an exhibition called "Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare". The Gare Saint-Lazare is mentioned or plays a role in Émile Zola's ''

La Bête humaine ''La Bête humaine'' (English: ''The Beast Within'' or ''The Beast in Man'') is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. The story has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions. The seventeenth book in Zola's '' Les Rougon-Macquart'' series, it is b ...

'' and Roland Sadaune's ''Terminus St-Lazare''. The Gare Saint-Lazare is seen in the 1995 film ''

French Kiss A French kiss, also known as cataglottism or a tongue kiss, is an amorous kiss in which the participants' tongues extend to touch each other's lips or tongue. A kiss with the tongue stimulates the partner's lips, tongue and mouth, which are se ...

'' with

Kevin Kline Kevin Delaney Kline (born October 24, 1947) is an American actor. He is the recipient of an Academy Award and three Tony Awards. In addition, he has received nominations for two British Academy Film Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and five ...

and Meg Ryan. It is the last scene in Paris where Kevin Kline's character is being chased by Police Inspector Jean-Paul Cardon ( Jean Reno) while trying to board a train south to

Cannes Cannes ( , , ; oc, Canas) is a city located on the French Riviera. It is a commune located in the Alpes-Maritimes department, and host city of the annual Cannes Film Festival, Midem, and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The ...

(which is an inaccuracy since the Gare Saint-Lazare serves the North-West of France; trains for Cannes depart from the Gare de Lyon).

Services

The Gare Saint-Lazare is served by regional

TER Normandie TER Normandie is the regional rail network serving the region of Normandy, northwestern France. It is operated by the French national railway company SNCF. It was formed in 2016 from the previous TER networks TER Basse-Normandie and TER Haute-No ...

trains toward Normandy, as well as regional Transilien trains to the western suburbs of Paris. 1,600 trains serve Gare Saint-Lazare every day.

TER Normandie

Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 8 April 2014 001

The following regional train services operate out of Saint-Lazare:Plan du réseau
TER Normandie, accessed 14 April 2022. * Paris – Vernon –

Rouen Rouen (, ; or ) is a city on the River Seine in northern France. It is the prefecture of the region of Normandy and the department of Seine-Maritime. Formerly one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe, the population ...

–

Le Havre Le Havre (, ; nrf, Lé Hâvre ) is a port city in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region of northern France. It is situated on the right bank of the estuary of the river Seine on the Channel southwest of the Pays de Caux, very ...

* Paris – Évreux –

Lisieux Lisieux () is a commune in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France. It is the capital of the Pays d'Auge area, which is characterised by valleys and hedged farmland. Name The name of the town derives from the ...

–

Caen Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,Cherbourg Cherbourg (; , , ), nrf, Chèrbourg, ) is a former commune and subprefecture located at the northern end of the Cotentin peninsula in the northwestern French department of Manche. It was merged into the commune of Cherbourg-Octeville on 28 Febr ...

* Paris – Évreux – Lisieux – Trouville-Deauville

Suburban (Transilien)

The following Transilien lines depart from Saint-Lazare: *J **Saint-Lazare – Conflans – Gisors **Saint-Lazare – Ermont-Eaubonne **Saint-Lazare – Conflans – Mantes-la-Jolie **Saint-Lazare – Poissy – Mantes-la-Jolie – Vernon *L **Saint-Lazare – Cergy-le-Haut **Saint-Lazare – Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche **Saint-Lazare – Versailles-Rive-Droite

References

;Notes ;Bibliography *

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Saint-Lazare Railway termini in Paris Railway stations in France opened in 1837 SNCF Buildings and structures in the 8th arrondissement of Paris