The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt

What you are looking at

The picture is almost colorless. A pale, milky sky fills the top half, its brushstrokes faintly visible as a grey-white weave. Across the middle runs a low line of snowy hills and, at the right, the houses and trees of a riverside village, a cluster of rust, violet and blue-grey touches in all that white, with a church tower and a few poplars rising above the roofs. Below, the Seine is open water, grey-lilac and perfectly still, mirroring the village in short vertical strokes. Across the foreground drift slabs of broken ice in long, uneven strips, white on top, edged with dark green and blue where the water laps them.

In the lower left corner Monet's signature and the date, "Claude Monet 80," are painted straight onto the ice.

Claude Monet painted the scene in the winter of 1880 on the Seine at Lavacourt, the hamlet facing Vétheuil across the river. The canvas is a long, low format, 46 by 81.5 centimeters, and is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 563. It is in a private collection; its provenance is recorded from a British collector, J. C. W. Sawbridge-Erle-Drax, in 1933.

Where and when

Monet had moved to Vétheuil, a village on the Seine about 60 kilometers downriver from Paris, in the late summer of 1878. Lavacourt lay on the opposite bank, and he painted both from the river, the fields and a boat. See Monet at Vétheuil.

In December 1879 a severe cold snap froze the Seine solid. Early in January 1880 the thaw came, and the ice broke up with a noise like gunfire; huge floes ground their way downstream, damaging boats and banks. The French word for this is débâcle, and Monet painted it more than a dozen times, in grey weather, in sun, at dawn and at sunset, from both banks.

It was a hard winter for him in every sense. His wife Camille had died the previous September, the household he shared with Alice Hoschedé and her children was in debt, and he was working largely alone. Many of the débâcle pictures share this one's emptiness: no figures, no boats, only ice, water and a distant village.

How it was painted

The palette is restricted to white, grey, lilac, a little blue and a few warm accents in the houses. Within that narrow range Monet finds a great deal of variety. The floes in the foreground are thick, flat strokes of white laid horizontally, with dark green-black lines beneath them for their submerged edges; farther back they become thin slivers. The open water between is a smooth, pale lilac, the most thinly painted passage in the picture.

The reflections of the village and the trees are short vertical strokes in the still water, the only verticals below the horizon. Notice how the long format stretches everything sideways, making the river seem broader and the cold more pervasive. The sky is barely modeled at all, a pale layer that seems to press down on the landscape. The modest size suggests Monet worked on the bank, in the open, in front of the motif.

The motif and its siblings

Several larger débâcle canvases are in public collections, including the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor and the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. In the French national collections, The Breaking Up of the Ice near Vétheuil shows a similar grey day. At sunset the same ice becomes Sunset on the Seine in Winter and the large Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt in the Petit Palais. The village under snow before the thaw appears in Lavacourt in Winter; Monet returned to drifting ice at Bennecourt in 1893 in Ice Floes.

Where to see it

This canvas is privately owned and appears only occasionally in exhibitions or sales. To see the débâcle series in person, visit the public collections above; for a guide by museum, see where to see Monet's paintings. For the artist, see Claude Monet.