Entrance to the Grande Rue at Argenteuil, Winter

Entrance to the Grande Rue at Argenteuil, Winter (L'Entrée de la Grande Rue à Argenteuil, l'hiver) is one of the snow scenes Claude Monet painted in the hard winter of 1874–75 in Argenteuil, the town on the Seine northwest of Paris where he lived from 1871 to 1878. The canvas, 56.7 by 63.3 centimeters, is signed and dated 1875 at lower right and belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (inventory 1997-43), which acquired it in 1997; older lists of Monet's works still give it as privately owned.

What you are looking at

We stand at the edge of town, where a road curves in toward the Grande Rue, Argenteuil's main street. Melting snow covers the ground in uneven patches of white, blue and dirty brown, cut by wheel ruts and footprints, and a muddy track sweeps across the foreground from left to right. In the middle of it a woman in a long dark coat walks toward us, a small child at her side. Further back, a man in a top hat and a few other figures pick their way along the road, and a slim gas lamp stands at the right.

At the left a covered cart, its hood a pale, rounded shape, waits beneath a group of tall bare trees whose branches dissolve into a gray-violet mist. Behind them the houses of the Grande Rue climb away in a jumble of snowy roofs and pale façades, and the thin spire of the church rises at the right against a heavy, overcast sky, framed by more bare trees and a garden wall.

How it was painted

The picture is a study in grays. Monet builds the snow from many colors, lilac, ochre, blue and pink, rather than plain white, and lets the brown of the road show through the thaw. The foreground is the most thickly worked area: wet earth in long, dragged strokes of umber and gray, broken by clots of white. The trees are scrubbed in with a dry brush, the figures in a few dark strokes, and the houses as flat planes of cream and gray with roofs picked out in white.

The square-ish format and the curve of the road give the composition a gentle swing. The eye enters at the lower left, follows the track past the woman and child, and is led up to the spire. The low, dull light gives the scene the damp chill of a late winter afternoon, when the snow is already going gray.

Argenteuil under snow

Monet painted some eighteen snow scenes at Argenteuil in the winter of 1874–75, more than in any other season of his career. They include Snow at Argenteuil, The Boulevard de Pontoise at Argenteuil, Snow, Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter and Train in the Snow. Money was short and the winter long, and the pictures are quieter and bleaker than his summer views of regattas and gardens. Snow had fascinated him since The Magpie of 1868–69, and he would come back to it at Vétheuil four years later. Our hub on Monet at Argenteuil gathers the town's pictures in every season.

The motif itself is telling. Rather than the river or the picturesque old streets, Monet paints the ragged edge of a suburb: a road, a lamp post, a parked cart, a mother and child on an errand. This ordinary corner, seen in poor weather, is exactly the kind of subject academic painters ignored and the Impressionists made their own. Its companions in the same winter are equally plain: a boulevard of villas, a railway line, a stretch of riverbank. Together they amount to a portrait of a small modern town in hard weather, painted by someone who lived there and knew its streets.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, which holds a small but choice group of Impressionist works in its former abbey building on the Place des Terreaux. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.