The current station building opened in 1889 and was designed by architect Juste Lisch; the maître d'œuvre (general contractor) was Eugène Flachat.

Painted from the backyard of a friend's house on the nearby rue de Rome, this canvas,[4] now in the National Gallery of Art at Washington D.C., portrays a woman with a small dog and a book as she sits facing us in front of an iron fence; a young girl to her left views the railroad track and steam beyond it.

Artists such as Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot, do this in order to accurately portray the scene in the moment instead of creating the painting from what they could remember.

Claude Monet's depiction of this train station is an astonishing composition in which the hard-edged discs of the railroad signals hover above a rapidly scribbled swirl of blue and rose clouds of steam, with scrolled white edges, while the sketchy, angular drawing of the tracks and buildings provides contrast.

The flat, opaque circle of the largest signal, placed dead center and thickly painted, is so insistent that it turns the picture into a near-abstraction.

In spite of the impressionist style, the work reproduces accurately the topography of the area, even allowing one to deduce the precise point where the artist was standing while painting.

This is the first time an artist had showed a single theme through a series of variations"[12] The Gare Saint-Lazare itself, a monument to the last word in state-of-the-art transportation, the railroad.

Le Quartier de l'Europe, where artists like Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte spent a lot of time and painted was, in short, a paradigm of modern Paris; the forward-looking young artists who called it home, and who had consciously dedicated themselves to the interpretation of modern life, included in their work recognizable references to their neighborhood as a sign of both their commitment to the present, with all its irregularities and "unaesthetic" components, and their rejection of the past, with its Academy-sanctioned conventions.

[13] In 1932, the wasteland behind the station became the subject of one of the most celebrated photographs of all time, Henri Cartier-Bresson's Derrière la gare de Saint-Lazare.

In 1998 the Musée d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., put on an exhibition called "Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare".

[5] The Gare Saint-Lazare is mentioned or plays a role in Émile Zola's La Bête humaine and Roland Sadaune's Terminus St-Lazare.