The Church in Vétheuil in Winter

What you are looking at

The square tower of a Gothic church rises over a cluster of village roofs, white with snow. Below the tower the church's pinnacled east end shows between the houses, and in front of them bare trees reach up with tangled, wiry branches, one pollarded willow at left with a thick knotted head. A wooden fence and a small gate run along the bank in the middle distance, and beside the gate stands a single small figure in dark clothes.

A strip of snowy ground crosses the canvas just below the middle. Under it, the lower half of the picture is water or wet, half-thawed ground, dark olive and brown, broken by horizontal strokes of grey, white and ochre where patches of snow and reflected sky float on the surface. The sky above is a flat, pale grey-white. Monet signed the canvas at lower left.

Claude Monet painted this view of Vétheuil in the winter of 1878–79, a few months after he moved to the village. The Musée d'Orsay, which owns it, catalogues it as Effet de neige à Vétheuil, also known as L'Église de Vétheuil, neige. It measures 52.5 by 71 centimeters and is number 506 in Wildenstein's catalogue.

Where and when

Vétheuil is a village on a bend of the Seine about 60 kilometers northwest of Paris. Monet moved there in the late summer of 1878, desperate for cheaper living. He shared a rented house with his wife Camille, who was seriously ill after the birth of their second son, Michel, in March, their two boys, and Alice Hoschedé and her six children, whose husband Ernest had gone bankrupt. The church of Notre-Dame, on its rise above the village, dominated every view, and Monet painted it from the river, from the fields and from the streets in all seasons. See Monet at Vétheuil.

This is one of the first winter views. Gustave Caillebotte, the painter and collector who supported his friends by buying their work, bought it from Monet in January 1879 for 200 francs, and it was shown at the fourth Impressionist exhibition that spring. The season ended in grief: Camille died at Vétheuil on 5 September 1879.

How it was painted

The picture is divided into two almost equal halves, village above, water below, with the snowy bank as a bright seam between them. Look at how differently Monet treats them. The roofs and church are painted in small, crisp touches of white and grey, with the walls in muted ochre and violet. The trees are drawn with quick, dark lines that thin out into a haze of twigs. The foreground, by contrast, is laid in long, dragged horizontals, thick and heavy, with patches of reflected snow floating in it.

The colors are muted, a range of browns, greys and whites. That restraint suits the subject, a raw day in a poor winter, and it makes the small warm notes, the ochre of a wall, the rust in the willow, count for more. The small figure by the gate gives the scale and, with it, a sense of how cold and empty the morning is.

The motif and its siblings

Monet painted Vétheuil's church across the water, from the road and close up, through all the seasons of 1878–81. Compare Vétheuil Church, also in the Orsay; the snowy approaches in Road into Vétheuil in Winter in Gothenburg and Road to Vétheuil, Snow Effect; and the summer panoramas such as View of Vétheuil. The following winter brought the great freeze and the débâcle pictures, among them The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, which received it with the Caillebotte bequest in 1896; it passed through the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre before reaching the Orsay in 1986. See Monet at the Musée d'Orsay, and for the artist, Claude Monet.