Sunset on the Seine in Winter

What you are looking at

A small red sun hangs low in an orange haze, just above a row of houses so faint they are barely there. Below it, the Seine is choked with ice. Flat floes, grey and white with blue shadows, drift across water that reflects the sky in streaks of salmon and gold. On the left a ragged island of bare, rust-colored brush pokes up from the river; on the right a darker bank rises into a stand of leafless trees, their trunks and branches drawn in thin blue-green and violet lines against the glow.

There is no figure, no boat and no path into the scene. The only things that move are the light and the ice, and the picture is organized around the vertical line that runs from the sun down through its broken reflection on the water.

Claude Monet signed and dated the canvas "Claude Monet 80" at lower left. It measures 60.6 by 81.1 centimeters, is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 574, and belongs to the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted the scene in the winter of 1879–80 on the stretch of the Seine at Vétheuil, the village about 60 kilometers downriver from Paris where he had lived since the late summer of 1878. Across the water lay the hamlet of Lavacourt, and the low line of roofs under the sun belongs to one bank or the other of that reach of river. For his years there, see Monet at Vétheuil.

That December the Seine froze over in one of the coldest spells of the century. When the thaw came in early January 1880, the ice broke up with a noise heard across the valley, and great floes ground downstream for days. Monet painted the event repeatedly: the frozen river, the breakup, the floating ice under grey skies and at sunset. These are the débâcle pictures, and they belong to the bleakest months of his life. His wife Camille had died on 5 September 1879, the household he shared with Alice Hoschedé and eight children was in debt, and his paintings were selling poorly.

How it was painted

This is a picture about temperature as much as light. Monet sets the two halves of the color wheel against each other: hot orange and red in the sky, cold blue-grey and white in the ice, and the red disc of the sun beside the green-black of the bank. The floes are built from a few horizontal strokes of thick white edged with blue, laid wet into the orange water, and they get smaller and closer together as they recede, which makes the river stretch back toward the light.

The sky is scrubbed in with broad, loose strokes, thinner than the paint below, so the haze seems to hang in front of the village. The trees at right are a different kind of mark altogether: long, wiry lines dragged with a small brush, almost drawing. That contrast between flat haze, thick ice and linear branches is what keeps a near-monochrome picture lively.

The scale suggests work outdoors on the bank, at speed, in the short winter dusk. Monet could not have held a sunset like this for more than a session or two, which is why so many of the débâcle canvases are this size.

The larger version

Monet worked the same composition up into a much bigger canvas, Soleil couchant sur la Seine à Lavacourt, effet d'hiver, about 100 by 150 centimeters, now in the Petit Palais in Paris: see Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect. He considered sending it to the Salon of 1880, then held it back as too personal for the jury and submitted a more conventional view of Lavacourt instead.

The Hakone canvas is the more immediate of the two. Its paint is looser, its sky stronger, and it has the look of something made in front of the motif. Compare it with the grey daylight of The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt and The Breaking Up of the Ice near Vétheuil in the French national collections, and with the snowbound village of Lavacourt in Winter. Thirteen years later Monet returned to the subject at Bennecourt, upriver from Giverny, in Ice Floes.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Pola Museum of Art, a museum in the forested hills of Hakone, south-west of Tokyo, built around the collection of the businessman Suzuki Tsuneshi and strong in French Impressionism. Works are rotated, so check the museum's current displays before a visit. For other public holdings, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist's life, Claude Monet.