Reception
When the painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy. Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized the symbol of modernity that it has become today" (Dervaux 1). The painting was displayed at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio in late 2012.
Shortly after it was completed, the painting was sold to baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure. It was sold in 1881 for 5,400 francs to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who gave it several names: " Enfant regardant le chemin fer", "Le pont de l'Europe", "A la Gare St. Lazare", and later just "Gare St. Lazare". It was sold on 31 December 1898 for 100,000 francs to American Henry Osborne Havemeyer. His wife Louisine Havemeyer left 2,000 artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on her death in 1929, but she divided a small collection, including The Railway, among her three children. The painting was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1956 on the death of her son Horace Havemeyer.
Read more about this topic: The Railway
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
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—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)