Snow at Argenteuil

What you are looking at

Snow is still falling. Monet scatters white flakes over the entire canvas, small dabs of paint dotted on top of everything else, across the dark trees, the grey sky and the figures, so that we seem to look through the storm. A lane curves up from the lower left, its surface trodden into brown and lilac slush. On it two figures in dark coats huddle together under an umbrella, heading away from us. On the left a high green-grey wall and a cottage with a thick white roof line the road; at right a sloping garden or field shows green through a thin cover of snow. Two big trees, one rust-brown, still holding dead leaves, the other bare and silvery, frame the view, with a dark fir at the far right. Between them the snowy roofs of more houses fill the middle distance under a heavy grey sky.

Notice the green field. Monet paints the half-covered ground as hundreds of small strokes of white, mint, sage and dark green, a mottled pattern quite different from the smooth whites of his earlier snowscapes. The sky is brushed in long, streaky diagonals, as if the wind were driving the snow across it. The signature, "Claude Monet," is at lower left.

Argenteuil in winter

Monet lived in Argenteuil, a fast-growing suburb on the Seine northwest of Paris, from the end of 1871 until 1878. The winters there gave him a series of snow scenes, and in the hard winter of 1874–75 above all he painted the boulevards, the railway, the riverbank and the lanes around his house again and again. Wildenstein catalogues well over a dozen snow pictures from these years, several of them simply titled Snow at Argenteuil. The Boston museum dates this one to about 1874.

The lane here is not a famous street but a back road on the edge of town, where suburb met field. That border, half village, half countryside, was characteristic of Argenteuil in the 1870s and of Monet's pictures of it.

How it was painted

This canvas is one of the few that shows snow actually falling rather than lying on the ground after a storm, a far harder effect to paint. Monet must have worked quickly, probably in one or two sessions. He laid in the scene first, sky, trees, wall and lane, then dabbed the flakes over the top once the underlying paint had begun to set, so that they sit as separate, raised touches. The flakes are not pure white everywhere: over the dark trees they are bright, while against the pale sky they are a slightly darker grey, which keeps them visible.

The Argenteuil snow scenes

The snow pictures from Argenteuil are among the most varied in Claude Monet's work. Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter, also in Boston, shows a wide street after the snow has stopped. Snow at Argenteuil of 1875 in the National Gallery, London, looks down a boulevard with a long line of walkers. Train in the Snow at the Marmottan puts a locomotive in the white landscape, and View at Argenteuil, Snow in Kansas City looks across the town. Against them, the Boston lane is the most intimate, a small corner in bad weather.

Meaning

The picture is about a sensation, the muffled light and blur of a snowfall, rather than about the place. The two figures under their umbrella are not characters; they give scale and a touch of human warmth to a cold scene. For collectors of the time such quiet winter suburbs were an unusual subject and hard to sell. Today they are among the most admired of Monet's Argenteuil works because they show how far he pushed the representation of weather.

Where to see it

This version is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which entered it in 1921 and owns one of the largest Monet collections in the United States; see our guide to Monet at the MFA Boston.