Road by Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter

What you are looking at

A wide country road, thick with snow and scored by wheel tracks, runs straight into the picture toward a low snow-covered roof and a rounded white tree in the distance. On the right a steep bank climbs into a wood of tall, bare trunks, their branches a dark tangle against the sky and their lower slopes patched with snow and brown earth. On the left a low fence of dark posts runs along the roadside, half buried in drifts, with a line of feathery bare trees behind it. Two figures walk away from us in the middle distance, close together. A third, nearer, stands at the right edge of the road, leaning on a stick. Overhead a scattering of black crows wheels across a pale, cream-grey sky.

The light is the subject. A low winter sun seems to break through somewhere behind the trees, warming the sky to buff and making the snow glow. Monet paints the snow not as white but as a range of creams, blue-greys and lilacs, with the shadows of the ruts in cool blue that run in long lines toward the vanishing point. The crows, a handful of quick dark marks, give the empty sky scale and motion. The signature, "Claude Monet," is at lower left.

Look at the woods on the right. Each trunk is a single dark vertical stroke, and the twigs at the top are scratched in with a fine brush, while the snow on the bank is laid on in thick, broken patches over the brown. The contrast between that busy, dark side of the picture and the open, pale road on the left gives the composition its weight.

Honfleur and Saint-Siméon

The Saint-Siméon farm was an inn on the hillside road above Honfleur, run by Mère Toutain, where painters gathered from the 1850s on: Eugène Boudin, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Courbet and the young Monet among them. Honfleur sits on the Seine estuary opposite Le Havre, where Monet grew up, at the edge of the coast covered in our Normandy coast hub. Monet painted the road outside the inn repeatedly, first in the summer and autumn of 1864 and again in the winter of 1867, when he stayed in the area and took up snow scenes.

That winter he made a small group of snowy views of the same road, which some writers count as his earliest series. The Road in Front of Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter, in the French national collections, shows the road without the walkers, and A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur in the Musée d'Orsay adds a horse and cart before the farm buildings. Comparing them shows Monet testing one motif under slightly different conditions and with different figures, an early hint of the method he would perfect decades later.

How it was painted

Painting snow outdoors in 1867 meant working in real cold, and Monet's friends described him at his easel in winter wrapped in coats with a brazier at his feet. The handling here is quick and economical. The road is laid in with long, flat strokes of pale paint; the figures are a few dabs of black and brown; the crows are flicked in last over the dry sky. The picture is relatively small and has the directness of a work finished in front of the motif.

Meaning

Snow was a subject that let Monet study how color behaves in reflected light, the problem that would define his career. The tiny walkers and the crows keep the scene in the register of everyday life, a road near an inn on a cold afternoon, rather than romantic solitude. A year later Claude Monet painted The Magpie near Étretat, where a single black bird on a fence does the work the crows do here.

Where to see it

This canvas is in a private collection and is seldom exhibited. Its companions from the same winter can be seen in Paris, and our guide on where to see Monet's paintings lists his snowscapes in public museums.