Floating Ice at Bennecourt

Floating Ice at Bennecourt is one of the paintings Claude Monet made in January and February 1893, when a hard frost froze the Seine near his home at Giverny and then broke it into drifting ice. Signed and dated Claude Monet 93 at lower right, it shows the river at Bennecourt, the village on the opposite bank, under a low winter sun. The canvas is recorded as being in a private collection, and its exact entry in the Monet catalogue raisonné has not yet been confirmed.

What you are looking at

The picture is split almost exactly in half by the far bank. Above it, a milky sky of white, pale blue and faint pink; below it, the river, a broad sheet of cool blue and lavender. In the center, standing on a low island, is a clump of tall bare trees whose upper branches are lit gold and apricot, as if the sun has found them through the haze. Smaller trees repeat the motif to the left and right, each one fainter than the last, until the distant bank becomes a band of lilac.

The floes are the next thing you notice. They lie on the water in loose horizontal rows, mostly on the left half of the river, each one a short, flat bar of white or cream with a blue edge on its shadowed side. Toward the island they crowd together into an almost solid shelf of ice; nearer to us they thin out, and open water shows between them.

Look below the island trees and you find them again. Their reflections drop straight down into the water as long, broken strokes of yellow and pink, crossing the rows of ice. This is the warmest part of the picture, and it sits in the coldest place: on the surface of a frozen river. At lower right, a bank of snow slides diagonally into the frame, the purest white on the canvas, with Monet's signature written in red-violet along its edge.

How it was painted

The whole canvas is pitched high. There are almost no darks; even the shadows on the ice are a clear mid-blue. Monet builds the winter light out of warm and cool tints played against each other, gold against lavender, pink against blue, rather than out of white and gray. That is why the picture feels sunlit even though nothing in it is warm.

The handling changes with the substance. The sky is scrubbed in with soft, crossing strokes. The water is smoother and more horizontal. The floes are separate touches of thicker paint that sit on top of the water layer, and the reflections are dragged vertically through it, so the two directions of brushwork, across and down, mirror the two things that are happening on the river.

The 1893 ice paintings at Bennecourt

The winter of 1892–93 was severe in northern France. According to the Museum Barberini, which owns one of the group, Monet made thirteen paintings of the ice on the Seine near Giverny in early 1893, ten of them focused on Bennecourt. They come at a busy moment: he had begun the Rouen Cathedral paintings the previous winter and was about to return to Rouen to continue them, and in February 1893 he bought the plot of land across the road from his house that would become the water-lily garden.

He had painted the same subject once before, at Vétheuil in the winter of 1879–80, when the Seine froze and broke up in a far more violent thaw; see The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt. The 1893 canvases are calmer and more systematic, closer in spirit to the series method of the Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral.

The Barberini canvas, Floes at Bennecourt (60 × 100 cm, Wildenstein 1334), uses almost the same arrangement as this one, with the island trees in the center and the snowy bank at lower right, but it is painted in a gray, foggy light. This version is the same view with the sun breaking through. Comparing the two shows the point of the whole group: the motif stays put while the weather changes everything. The Metropolitan Museum's Ice Floes is a quieter, more misty variant, and Ice Floes on the Seine near Bennecourt sets a dark thicket against silver ice.

Bennecourt and Giverny

Bennecourt faces Giverny across the Seine, and the wooded islands between them appear again and again in Monet's work of the 1890s. It is part of the landscape described on our Giverny hub, the stretch of river and meadow that Monet painted for more than forty years.

Where to see it

This canvas is privately owned and appears only occasionally on loan. To see the 1893 ice paintings in person, the Museum Barberini in Potsdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York each show one. For other public collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.