Glaçons à Bougival

What you are looking at

The Seine fills the left half of the picture, flat and grey, carrying slabs of ice downstream toward us. Beyond it a line of tall, bare poplars marches along the far bank into the mist. On the right the near bank is deep in snow. A few small dark figures stand at the water's edge beside two beached rowing boats, another walks up the snowy slope, and a row of houses half hidden in trees closes the view at the top right.

Almost everything is grey, white or brown. The sky is a single sheet of overcast, and it is barely distinguishable from the reflections in the water. The only real accents are the black figures and the dark posts sticking out of the snow, which Monet uses like punctuation to measure the distance along the bank.

Look at the ice floes in the foreground. They are a few flat, decisive strokes of white, laid on the water with almost no modeling, and they are what tells you the river is moving. Compare them with the busy, smaller touches on the right bank, where the snow, figures and boats are described much more closely. The contrast between still, broad water and a fussier shoreline is the picture's real structure.

Where and when it was painted

Bougival is a village on the Seine west of Paris, between Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the city. Monet looked upstream, with the Île de Croissy on the left. The winter of 1867–68 was very hard, and the Seine froze in several places.

It was a bad winter for Monet too. His large Women in the Garden had been refused by the Salon of 1867, his son Jean was born that August, and he was so short of money that he leaned heavily on Frédéric Bazille, who had agreed to buy Women in the Garden in monthly installments. That season he also painted the snow of Honfleur, as in The Road in Front of Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter, and soon afterward The Magpie. A year later he would be back at Bougival in summer for The Bridge at Bougival.

How it was painted

This was the first time Monet painted the Seine in ice, and he used almost no color to do it. The near-monochrome scheme has often been compared with the river views of James McNeill Whistler, whose work was on view in Paris during the Exposition Universelle of 1867, while Monet was living in the city. Whether Monet looked at Whistler or simply at the weather, the result is one of the quietest pictures of his early career.

The paint is handled in two registers: wide, flat passages for river and sky, and quick, precise touches for the bank. The canvas, about 65 by 81 centimeters, is a standard size Monet used constantly, large enough to be a finished picture but small enough to be worked outdoors.

The ice pictures

Monet returned to the frozen Seine more than a decade later, at Vétheuil, after the great freeze of 1879–80. Pictures such as The Breaking Up of the Ice near Vétheuil, which also belongs to the Louvre and came to it from the same collector, show what had changed: the brushwork is broken and restless, the color full of rose and blue. Set beside them, this early canvas looks restrained and almost classical. For the snow scenes of his early years, see also A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur.

Where to see it

The painting is one of the few Monets that belong to the Louvre rather than the Musée d'Orsay. It came from the collection of Victor Lyon, who owned it from 1935, as part of a gift to the French state in 1961 (inventory RF 1961 62), and it is shown in the Louvre with the other nineteenth-century pictures from that gift. It has traveled to exhibitions in France and Japan, including Turner, Whistler, Monet in Paris in 2004–05. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.