The Boulevard de Pontoise in Argenteuil under Snow

What you are looking at

A broad avenue runs away from us between bare trees, its surface trodden snow in tones of white, cream, mauve and grey, with two worn tracks of brown earth curving down the middle. On the left, behind a wall and a low shed, rise the snow-covered roofs of a large house with a square tower and tall chimneys. On the right, a row of slender trunks marks the edge of the road, their fine branches fanning out against a heavy, pale sky. Far down the boulevard a few dark figures walk through the slush, and the façades at the end of the street fade into the same grey-yellow light as the sky.

The weather is overcast, with no sun and no strong shadow. The snow is old enough to be churned and dirty in the road, still fresh and lumpy along the verges. Monet signed the canvas at lower left.

Claude Monet painted this view of the Boulevard de Pontoise in Argenteuil in the winter of 1875. It measures 61 by 82 centimeters, is number 359 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Where and when

Argenteuil, on the Seine northwest of Paris, was Monet's home from December 1871 to early 1878. The Boulevard de Pontoise was one of the town's main roads, the route out toward Pontoise, and in the autumn of 1874 Monet moved to a new house on the Boulevard Saint-Denis, in the same part of town near the railway station. This is a picture of his own neighborhood, the street he walked every day, rather than a picturesque view.

The winter of 1874–75 brought repeated snowfalls to the Paris region, and Monet painted the town under snow obsessively: about eighteen canvases survive from that season, more than from any other winter of his career. He painted streets, the railway, the riverbank and his garden, often in the flat, grey light of snow still falling or just fallen. For the whole Argenteuil period, see Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

Snow gave Monet a problem he loved: how to paint white so that it is never just white. Look at the road. The ruts and tracks are laid in with short, horizontal strokes of pinkish cream, lilac and blue-grey, with almost no pure white at all, and the brown earth shows through in two long, curving bands. The banks of snow at the sides are thicker, laid in rounded dabs that sit up on the surface.

The trees on the right are drawn with thin, quick verticals that get shorter and closer together as they recede, which pulls the eye down the avenue. Their branches are a scribble of fine dark lines over the sky, painted wet into wet so they soften at the edges. The house on the left is the most solid thing in the picture, its roofs picked out in white against warmer ochre walls.

Notice how close the range of tones is. Sky, snow and distant buildings are almost the same pale grey-yellow, and the whole picture holds together through small shifts of temperature rather than strong contrasts. That restraint is the point: it is the light of a real day in a suburban winter.

The motif and its siblings

Monet's winter pictures of 1875 belong to a tradition he helped invent, the snow scene as a study in color, which runs from The Magpie of 1868–69 to the haystacks in snow of 1890–91. From the same winter at Argenteuil come Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter in Boston, Snow at Argenteuil in London, Entrance of the Grande Rue at Argenteuil, Winter in Lyon and Train in the Snow at Argenteuil. The Basel canvas is one of the most open and spacious of the group, built on a single, deep perspective.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Kunstmuseum Basel, one of the oldest public art collections in Europe, with a strong group of French nineteenth-century paintings. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for his life, Claude Monet.