Vétheuil Church

What you are looking at

The picture is upright, unusual for a Monet landscape of these years. At the top left the square bell tower of Vétheuil's church rises against a pale, cold sky, capped with a steep slate spire dusted with snow. Below it, roofs, walls and the tops of bare trees are thick with white. In the middle of the canvas stands a small garden pavilion with a pointed roof and red walls, next to a blue-grey shed, behind a long dark fence of palings. Below the fence a snowy bank slopes down to the river, and the bottom of the picture is the Seine itself, dark and cold, with patches of snow or ice along its edge.

The color is the surprise. In a scene that is mostly white and grey, Monet finds the brick red of the pavilion, deep violet-blue in the fence and the shadows, and touches of rust and green in the water. The sky is not blue but a warm off-white, the color of a low winter sun behind thin cloud.

Look at how the snow is painted. On the bank it is a crust of thick, broken strokes, white mixed with lilac and yellow, laid on so heavily that it stands up from the canvas. On the roofs it is thinner and smoother. The paint itself tells you which snow is fresh and which has settled.

The little red pavilion is the picture's anchor. Placed just right of center, it is the warmest note on the canvas and the one shape with a definite outline, and the fence running across the picture behind it acts like a dark ruled line separating the village from the river. Take it away and the composition would slide into the water.

Where and when it was painted

Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on the Seine some 60 kilometers downstream from Paris, in the late summer of 1878. He came with his wife Camille, their two sons, and Alice Hoschedé and her six children, after the bankruptcy of Alice's husband Ernest, once Monet's patron. Money was desperately short. Camille was seriously ill and died in Vétheuil on 5 September 1879; Monet painted her on her deathbed, in Camille Monet on Her Deathbed.

The church of Notre-Dame, on its hill above the river, was the landmark of the village and Monet painted it repeatedly, in summer and in snow. He often worked from his studio boat on the river, which explains the low viewpoint here, looking up from the water. The two winters he spent in Vétheuil, 1878–79 and 1879–80, were both harsh; the second ended in the great freeze and thaw of the Seine. For the village and its pictures, see Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

The vertical format compresses the view into a stack of horizontal bands, river, bank, fence, roofs and sky, with the tower as the one vertical accent. Monet's touch is rapid and agitated, especially in the lower half, where short strokes in many directions keep the snow and water restless. Writers on the picture have read that agitation as grief, since it belongs to the hardest period of his life, but Monet left no statement linking the two, and the same nervous handling appears in other winter pictures of these months.

Compare the broader view of the same church across the river in The Church in Vétheuil in Winter, also in the Orsay, and the snowbound roads of Road into Vétheuil in Winter and Road to Vétheuil, Snow Effect. Across the river, the hamlet of Lavacourt appears in Lavacourt in Winter.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged to the collector and dealer Max Kaganovitch and entered the French national collections in 1973 (inventory RF 1973 18). It is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 505 and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. See Monet at the Musée d'Orsay and the Claude Monet page.