Sandvika, Norway

Claude Monet's Sandvika, Norway was painted in the late winter of 1895, during the only trip he ever made to Scandinavia. It shows the village of Sandvika, outside Christiania (now Oslo), buried in snow: an arched bridge over a frozen stream, wooden houses with red and pink trim, bare birches, and a rounded mountain behind. The canvas, 73.4 by 92.5 centimeters (Wildenstein 1397), is inscribed "Claude Monet 95" at lower left. It is in the Art Institute of Chicago, the gift of Bruce Borland.

What you are looking at

Everything is white, but no two whites are the same. Snow lies thick on the roofs, the banks, the bridge and the trees, and Monet paints it in cream, pale pink, lilac, blue and even pale green, depending on whether it catches light or lies in shadow. The air is thick and pale, as if more snow were about to fall.

In the lower left foreground, a humped bridge curves over the stream, its dark underside the darkest shape in the picture, its railings drawn in a few strokes of blue-green. Beyond it, a cluster of long wooden houses sits in the middle distance. Their walls show touches of red and coral, almost the only warm color on the canvas, and their roofs are heaped with snow. On the right, tall bare birches rise with snowy branches, painted in pinkish white over blue.

Behind the village, a rounded mountain fills the upper center, its wooded slopes frosted in turquoise and pale blue. The sky around it is a soft, pearly gray-pink.

The detail to look for is the bridge. The Art Institute notes that Sandvika's bridge may have reminded Monet of the Japanese bridge he had built over his water-lily pond at Giverny only a couple of years earlier, the bridge that would become the subject of The Japanese Footbridge.

Where and when

Monet traveled to Norway at the end of January 1895 to visit his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, who lived in Christiania. He stayed about two months, touring with Jacques, and found the trip physically exhausting. At first he was frustrated, unable to find motifs in the deep snow, and the light changed constantly. But he settled in the area around Sandvika and nearby Bjørnegård, and painted twenty-nine Norwegian scenes, including at least six views of Sandvika and several of the mountain Kolsås, which he compared to Mount Fuji.

How this version differs

Monet painted Sandvika from several angles and in different weather. Some views are dominated by the iron bridge in the foreground, others by the village or the mountain. This version balances all three, with the bridge low at left, the houses across the middle and the mountain on the axis. Its light is soft and diffuse, with no direct sun, and the palette is almost entirely pastel. It is a very different snow from the sparkling sun of Haystack in the Snow, Morning or the gray winter Seine of Lavacourt under Snow.

How it was painted

The paint is thick and creamy, laid on in short strokes that build up a heavy, textured surface, especially in the snow on the roofs and trees. Monet uses white mixed with small amounts of color rather than pure white, so that every snowy surface carries a tint. The few warm accents, the red house walls, the pink tones in the birches, are placed carefully to keep the picture from going cold.

Ownership and where to see it

Monet showed Sandvika views at Durand-Ruel in Paris in May 1895, and this canvas is probably one of them. In 1899 he donated it to the sale held for the children of his friend Alfred Sisley, who had died that year; it was bought by Durand-Ruel and sold in 1901 to Harriet Borland of Chicago. Her son Bruce Borland gave it to the Art Institute between 1961 and 1963. It is not always on display. For the museum's other Monets, see Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago; for the artist, Claude Monet.