A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur

What you are looking at

A broad country road, deep in snow and rutted by wheels, runs into the picture past a low farm building whose thick roof is buried under white. Near the center a small dark cart, with two figures hunched aboard, moves away from us toward a screen of frost-covered trees. On the right a steep snowy bank rises toward a dark line of woods, and along its foot a ditch of grey meltwater cuts a curving stripe through the white. Above it all hangs a pale, creamy winter sky. The scene is almost silent: no sun, no strong shadows, just the soft light of a winter afternoon in Normandy.

This is La Charrette, route sous la neige à Honfleur, painted by Claude Monet near the port town of Honfleur on the Seine estuary. It is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and measures about 65 by 92 centimeters. It is often called Monet's first completed snow scene, the start of a fascination that would run to well over a hundred winter pictures.

When was it painted?

When the canvas entered the Louvre in 1911, with the Camondo bequest, it was dated 1865. The Musée d'Orsay now prefers about 1867. The revised date rests on a letter written by the Honfleur painter Alexandre Dubourg describing the snow effects Monet was painting there in the winter of 1867, a period when he worked around the Saint-Siméon farm, an inn above the town that was a gathering place for painters. You will still see both dates in books and online; "c. 1867" is the museum's current view.

Looking closely

The picture is a study in whites, and almost none of them is white. The snow on the road is pale grey and buff where cart wheels have churned it; on the banks it takes on blues and faint violets; on the roofs it is brighter and creamier against the dark walls. Monet builds the surface with flat, loaded strokes, so the snow has weight and texture rather than glitter.

The darkest notes in the picture are the cart and its passengers, a cluster of browns and blacks placed just off center. They are the focal point and the measure of scale: everything else is road, bank and sky. The road itself is the composition's spine, a broad wedge narrowing into the distance that pulls the eye toward the cart and past it.

Look at the trees in the middle distance. Their branches, laden with snow, are drawn in quick strokes of grey and white over the sky, while the woods on the right are a dark mass that throws the white bank forward. Notice too the footprints and wheel ruts in the foreground, and the signature, "Claude Monet," written at lower left. Many writers have compared this spare arrangement, with its empty road and single small vehicle, to the snow prints of Utagawa Hiroshige, which were then reaching Paris. Monet later collected Japanese prints avidly, though how many he had seen by the mid-1860s is uncertain.

Monet and snow

Snow was a difficult subject for a painter who worked outdoors. It meant cold hands, short days and colors that changed within minutes. It also offered something academic landscape could not: a surface that showed, more clearly than anything else, how light and air alter color. Shadows on snow are blue; snow under an overcast sky is not white but a dozen greys. Monet's snow pictures became a laboratory for the ideas later called Impressionism.

The Honfleur winter produced a cluster of these pictures, including Road by Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter. A year or so later, at Étretat, Monet painted The Magpie, with its famous blue shadows and single black bird on a gate. Later winters brought the snowy roads of Louveciennes, such as Road at Louveciennes, Snow Effect, the Argenteuil snow scenes of 1874–75, and the ice floes of Vétheuil.

The meaning of a quiet picture

There is no narrative here, and that was part of its novelty. The cart is not going anywhere in particular; the driver has no story. Earlier landscape painters had used snow for drama, as in the winter scenes of the Dutch Golden Age with their skaters, or for mood, as in German Romantic painting. Monet treats it as weather, recorded honestly. The poetry, if there is any, is in the hush of the color. The figures on the cart are anonymous and turned away, a local going about ordinary business in bad weather. A viewer in the 1860s, used to landscapes with shepherds, ruins or picturesque peasants posed for effect, would have found the picture almost deliberately uneventful. That refusal of incident is one of the things that made Monet modern.

The picture also shows how much Monet owed to Normandy. He had grown up in Le Havre, across the estuary, and had learned to paint outdoors under Eugène Boudin. Honfleur, with its harbor and its painter-filled inn, was a second home in these years. Courbet, Boudin and Jongkind all worked there.

Where to see it

A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, which received it from the Louvre when the Orsay opened in 1986. It is usually shown with the museum's early Monets. For more of his winter landscapes and Normandy views, see our guide to famous Monet paintings.