Winter Sun at Lavacourt

Soleil d'hiver à Lavacourt (Winter Sun at Lavacourt) is a winter landscape by Claude Monet showing the hamlet of Lavacourt, across the Seine from his home at Vétheuil, under snow, with a small orange sun hanging low in a pink sky. It belongs to the hard winter of 1879–80, which Monet recorded in some two dozen canvases, and is catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 557. It is in the MuMa, the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre, the city where Monet grew up.

What you're looking at

The composition is very simple and very flat. A high horizon line runs straight across the canvas a little above the middle. On it sit the low roofs of Lavacourt and a few bare trees, all in soft gray-blue, half lost in the haze. Just above them, left of center, the sun is a small disk of orange-red, the one strong spot of color in the picture.

The sky above is a wash of pink, rose and pale gray, laid in with loose diagonal strokes. Below the horizon, a broad expanse of snow and ice, the frozen or snow-covered river and its bank, fills the lower half, painted in long, regular horizontal strokes of lilac, gray-blue, white and pale pink, spaced so that the bare canvas shows between them. In the middle a rounded clump of bare, frosted bushes stands up out of the snow, and at the right a larger frosted tree and shrubs rise toward the sky, their twigs touched with white. The signature is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

In September 1878 the Monet family moved to Vétheuil, on a bend of the Seine about 50 kilometers downstream from Paris. From the house Monet could see across the river to Lavacourt, behind which the winter sun set. In December 1879 an exceptional cold spell froze the Seine; when the thaw came in January 1880 the ice broke up and swept downstream, carrying away bridges near Paris. Monet painted the snow, the frozen river and the breakup of the ice day after day from December to March, often from a studio boat moored at the bottom of his garden. Camille had died in September 1879, and these austere winter pictures were made in the months that followed. See Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

The museum's commentary draws attention to the long, parallel strokes of the lower half, which reinforce the horizontal and leave the canvas visible, and to the color harmony built on the complementary contrast of orange and blue, a lesson in optical color that colorists had followed since Delacroix. The small orange sun is enough to warm the whole cold scheme of lilac and blue around it.

How it compares

The same view of Lavacourt at sunset appears in a larger, more finished canvas, Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, in Winter in the Petit Palais, and in Sunset on the Seine in Winter in the Pola Museum. Those show open water and drifting ice reflecting the sun; the Le Havre picture shows the landscape locked in snow and frost, earlier in the freeze. For the breakup that followed, see Floating Ice on the Seine and Lavacourt in Winter.

Where to see it

The painting is in the MuMa in Le Havre (inventory A 485), on the seafront near the harbor mouth that Monet painted in Impression, Sunrise. The museum has one of the largest collections of Impressionist painting in France outside Paris, including several works by Monet. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.