I remember the magnificent painting "The Gare Saint-Lazare." Installed at the Musée d'Orsay, I stood before this Impressionist work, mesmerized, trying to understand what I was ultimately seeing: a succession of impressions that shifted as I observed them, and the incomprehension that a simple movement on my part altered the colors…

I gazed in wonder at the gray of the smoke in the painting and understood that this smoke was not only gray…

In fact, it also shifted into a bright white or an intense black, sparingly illuminated by the yellow reflections of a spotlight. The gray of the smoke held an infinite number of variations. I was wondering how to define the color of smoke. Without hesitation, I answered that it was gray. Monet, however, depicted it in cobalt blue, in lead white.

I was troubled and thought about what I had learned about the color of shadows, which, according to Vinciane Lacroix, depends on the object cast by its shadow: "Diffuse reflection determines what painters call the local color of the object: orange for the pumpkin, red for the apple, and finally green for the lemon." Everything depends on the color of the light illuminating it.
Thus, the light of the shadow can be manipulated to alter an atmosphere, and the same is true for the smoke in Monet's and Manet's paintings. Colors and shadows—what would colors be without shadows?

PS: With the painting of the "Gare Saint-Lazare," Impressionist painters like Manet and Monet had a key to nature that served as their open-air studio. This is what Baudelaire called: "an invitation to travel."