Art+History
Manet’s The Railway by Édouard Manet, 1874

Monday, December 8, 2025 | 7:00 PM ET | Online Event

Great art is timeless, and speaks to us across time, culture, and space. Yet great works come from real people living real lives – whether their work was made 5 minutes or 500 years ago. Popular Smithsonian Associates speaker Paul Glenshaw brings his Art+History lecture series to the French-American Cultural Foundation with The Railway by Édouard Manet.

A young woman stares out from the canvas, seated on a ledge in front of an iron rail. A puppy sits on her lap. A young girl next to her faces the opposite direction, seemingly staring at a huge cloud of water vapor from a passing train in the rail yard below. When it was first seen, Manet presented his fellow Parisians with a truly modern scene of an everyday passing moment. They hated it. Why were his works such radical departures in French painting?

Manet was born in medieval Paris and died in modern Paris. His city was radically altered, both physically and politically, several times over his lifetime. What did this scene represent, in the midst of these transformations, and only three years after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and bloody Commune of 1870 and 1871? Join presenter Paul Glenshaw for an immersive experience exploring Manet’s city and its changing times.

 

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About Paul Glenshaw

Paul Glenshaw’s career covers several disciplines, all fueling the same goal: storytelling. In addition to being a longtime lecturer, drawing instructor, and tour leader, he is a documentary filmmaker and practicing artist.

Art+History is his long-running popular lecture series initially created for the Smithsonian Associates and has been presented in person and online to public and private groups around the country. His documentaries The Lafayette Escadrille, Anacostia Delta, and Barnstorming are all streaming on the PBS Passport platform. He has a special interest in French-American history and is working with Dr. Iris de Rode and Humanus Documentary Films to create En Route for Revolution, based on Dr. de Rode’s research. He is an expert in the history of early aviation and was a longtime contributor to Air & Space Smithsonian magazine. His articles have appeared in publications as diverse as Racquet magazine and the Folger Library’s Shakespeare and Beyond blog. He began his career at the National Gallery of Art, selling postcards in the bookstore. A lifetime resident of the Washington, DC area, he is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis.