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The Railway

Edouard Manet’s horizontal painting, The Railway, offers an intriguing study in contrasts and ambiguity. To the left, Victorine Meurent sits on a low stone wall at the base of an iron fence, holding an open book, a closed red fan, and a sleeping brown and white puppy in her lap. She wears a navy-blue dress with white piping and a black hat adorned with two red poppies and a daisy. To the right, a young girl with blond hair tied in a black ribbon stands facing away, grasping a bar of the fence while gazing at the steam billowing from the tracks. The black fence separates the middle-class and may symbolize increasing class division in late-19th-century France. In the upper right stands the Pont de l'Europe, a bridge favored by 19th-century French painters, while a building beyond the steam houses the studio Manet moved into in 1873.