Lavacourt in Winter

Lavacourt in Winter (Lavacourt, l'hiver) is a snow scene Claude Monet painted in 1879 at Lavacourt, the hamlet on the left bank of the Seine directly across the river from Vétheuil, where he lived from 1878 to 1881. The canvas, 50.6 by 66 centimeters, is number 514 in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné and is in a private collection.

What you are looking at

Monet stands on the riverside road at the edge of the hamlet and looks along it. On the left rises the end wall of an old stone house with a steep, dark, mossy roof, and beyond it a row of low buildings in brown, rust and gray. A line of bare, pollarded trees runs along the road beside them, their branches a lilac scribble against the sky.

The road is covered in trodden, half-melted snow. Two or three small dark figures walk away from us along it, toward a point where the road narrows and disappears. On the right the bank falls to the river, where a dark boat lies drawn up along the shore and the far bank dissolves into a gray mist of poplars and roofs. The sky takes up more than half the picture and is almost colorless: a heavy, brushed gray-white, scored with diagonal strokes as if snow were still in the air. Monet signed the canvas at lower left.

How it was painted

The snow in the foreground is broken by patches of brown earth and puddles, laid in with quick, scumbled strokes, so the whole surface feels wet and cold rather than crisp. Notice how the brightest whites are not in the sky but on the road, where a band of fresher snow leads the eye in from the lower edge. The river is reduced to a pale strip of gray-violet, and the far bank is barely more than a smudge. A few figures for scale, bare branches drawn with a dry brush, and a narrow range of grays, browns and dull whites are all Monet needs to make you feel the weather.

Context: the Vétheuil winters

The Vétheuil years were among the hardest of Monet's life. He was short of money, sharing a house with the family of his bankrupt patron Ernest Hoschedé, and his wife Camille was gravely ill. She died there in September 1879 (see Camille Monet on Her Deathbed). The winter that followed was one of the coldest on record in France. The Seine froze, and when the ice broke up in early January 1880 Monet painted the drifting floes in a burst of pictures, among them The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt and Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect.

The present canvas is dated 1879 in the catalogue raisonné, which may place it in the earlier, milder snows of that year or at the very start of the great cold. Snow scenes of Lavacourt are hard to date precisely, since Monet often finished or signed them later. The best-known example, Lavacourt under Snow in the National Gallery, London, is dated 1881 but probably belongs to the same period. From his own side of the river he also painted The Church at Vétheuil in Winter and Road into Vétheuil in Winter.

Why Monet painted snow

Monet had been drawn to snow since the 1860s, when he painted The Magpie and the winter roads of Honfleur. Snow suited the Impressionist argument that shadows are colored and that white surfaces take on the hue of the sky. At Vétheuil the motif also carried personal weight. The bleak, emptied landscapes of these years are often read as reflecting his grief and isolation, though Monet himself never described them that way. Our hub on Monet at Vétheuil follows the whole period.

Where to see it

This painting is in a private collection and is not on public view. For comparable winter views from the same years in public collections, see the National Gallery's Lavacourt under Snow or the Musée d'Orsay's Church at Vétheuil, and our guide to where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.