Exterior of Saint-Lazare Station (The Signal) - Not long after completing his first works on this subject, Monet showed seven Gare Saint-Lazare paintings at the Third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. The reception given to them by most of the press was hostile. But commentators at the time highlighted a crucial aspect to these paintings: synaesthesia, or the association of several different types of sensory experience. They describe the paintings as giving the impression of several locomotives whistling simultaneously, or as reflecting how travellers experience the noise of engines at arrival or departure times. This blend of sensations also finds expression in the deafening fog of engine smoke that enshrouds the area around the station, revealing only the red signal. Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).