The Breaking Up of the Ice near Vétheuil

What you are looking at

The Seine runs toward us out of a white mist, crowded with floes of ice. They fill the river from bank to bank, pale grey and blue-white, flat slabs jostling in dark water. On the left a clump of bare, red-brown trees leans over the water; on the right a bigger mass of leafless trees rises in a haze of rose, violet and grey. In the middle distance a third, paler stand of trees on an island almost dissolves into the fog. The sky is a soft, colorless light that merges with the far river.

There are no people, no boats and no buildings. The only movement is the ice, and Monet makes it move by changing the shape of his strokes: long and flat in the foreground, shorter and tighter as the floes recede, until they become a band of white flecks at the horizon.

The detail most people miss is the color in the trees. From a distance they read as brown. Close up they are made of pink, lilac, orange and blue, woven together with a dry brush, and that warmth is what keeps a picture about ice from feeling dead.

Where and when it was painted

In December 1879 the Seine froze solid in one of the coldest winters of the century. Monet was living at Vétheuil, downstream from Paris, with his two sons and the family of Alice Hoschedé. His wife Camille had died that September, and the household was deep in debt. During the freeze he walked the countryside painting snow, and when the thaw came on the night of 4–5 January 1880 and the ice broke up with a roar, he made the débâcle the subject of about a dozen canvases.

This one looks downstream from the Vétheuil side toward the islands in the river. The same days produced The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt, under grey daylight, and two sunset versions, Sunset on the Seine in Winter in Hakone and the large Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt in the Petit Palais. For the whole period, see Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

The canvas, 65.2 by 93 centimeters, is a horizontal format that suits a wide river. Monet worked quickly and probably outdoors, in conditions that changed by the hour. The ice is laid on in thick, creamy strokes of white tinted with blue and grey; the water between the floes is a darker, thinner paint; the mist is scumbled over everything at the top so the far trees seem to sink into it.

What separates the débâcle pictures from Monet's earlier winter scenes is this fragmentation. Compare his first river-ice picture, Glaçons à Bougival of about 1867–68, now in the same museum and from the same collector: there the ice is a few flat shapes on a calm grey river. Twelve years later the whole surface breaks into touches of color, and the subject is as much the vibration of light as the ice itself.

The débâcle pictures sold. Snow and ice scenes were among the few things Monet could place with buyers that winter, and the series helped him through one of the worst financial stretches of his career. It also gave him practice at something he would make central in the 1890s: painting the same motif again and again as conditions changed by the hour. He returned to drifting ice in 1893 at Bennecourt, in Ice Floes.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to the collector Victor Lyon. He gave it to the Louvre in 1961, keeping the use of it during his lifetime, and it physically entered the museum in 1977 (inventory RF 1961 61). It was lent to the 1939–40 New York World's Fair. It is one of the few Monets that belong to the Louvre rather than the Musée d'Orsay, and is shown with the other works from the Lyon gift in the Sully wing. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.