Ice Floes at Twilight

Claude Monet's Ice Floes at Twilight was painted in January 1893, when a hard winter froze the Seine near Giverny and the river broke up into drifting plates of ice. The light is that of late afternoon, warm on the sky, cold on the snow. The long, low canvas, 60 by 99.7 centimeters, is signed and dated "Claude Monet 93" at lower right and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 1344. It belongs to the Museum Langmatt in Baden, Switzerland, the former home of the collectors Sidney and Jenny Brown.

What you are looking at

The lower two-thirds of the canvas are ice. The river is packed with floes, each one painted as a flat, irregular patch in lilac, pale blue or white, with gaps of open water between them that catch the sky and glow pale yellow and peach. Toward the right foreground the ice thickens into a snowy, blue-white mass along the bank.

Across the river runs a low line of hills, their slopes white with snow and shadowed in deep violet and blue, with a few bare trees and darker patches where hedges and buildings show through. In the middle of the composition, an island or a clump of riverbank trees rises as a rounded mass of rust and red-brown, the one warm, solid shape in the picture. The sky is a high, pale band of cream, lemon and pink, the last light of the day.

The island of trees repays close looking. The Langmatt's catalogue essay describes how, up close, its brushwork becomes a nervously quivering bundle of lines that no longer reads as trees at all, in sharp contrast with the stillness of the frozen water. From across the room it snaps back into focus.

Where and when

The winter of 1892–93 was severe across northern France. In January 1893 the Seine, swollen and high, froze and then broke up, and Monet, who had lived at Giverny since 1883, went out to paint it. The same subject had gripped him once before, at Vétheuil in the winter of 1879–80, when he painted the famous débâcle pictures such as The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt. In 1893 he returned to it with the discipline of a series painter: the Langmatt says he painted twelve versions of this motif from roughly the same viewpoint.

Those 1893 pictures center on the river at Bennecourt, across from Giverny, with a few views near Port-Villez. Related canvases include the Metropolitan Museum's Ice Floes and Floating Ice at Bennecourt.

How this version differs

Several of the 1893 ice pictures record gray or pearly daylight. The Langmatt canvas is a twilight effect: the sky turns warm while the snow and ice go blue and violet, and the open water reflects gold. The warm, glowing island at the center is unusual for the group and gives the composition an anchor. As the Langmatt essay suggests, the glittering, fragmented surface of the floes also looks ahead to the Water Lilies, where the surface of the water would become the whole subject.

How it was painted

The floes are painted in flat, broad strokes laid side by side, each a separate shape, so that the river becomes a mosaic. The hills are worked in softer, blended passages of white and violet. The trees are a dense tangle of short, wiry strokes. The palette is restricted almost entirely to a complementary pair, yellow and violet, which gives the picture its sense of cold air lit by a warm sky.

For Monet's landscapes around his home, see Giverny: Monet's House and Garden.

Where to see it

The painting entered the collection of Sidney and Jenny Brown in 1910 and has been at their villa in Baden, now the Museum Langmatt, ever since. The museum's Impressionist collection, with works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley and Pissarro, has toured internationally while the villa was renovated. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.