Winter Landscape at the Val de Falaise (Giverny)

Claude Monet's Winter Landscape at the Val de Falaise (Paysage d'hiver au val de Falaise) was painted in 1885, two years after he settled at Giverny, in a small side valley near the village. A low farmhouse sits among bare, pollarded trees at the foot of a sunlit hillside on a clear winter day. The canvas, 65.4 by 80.5 centimeters, is signed and dated in red "Claude Monet 85" at lower left and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 975. It belongs to the Gabriele and Werner Merzbacher Collection and has been on permanent loan to the Kunsthaus Zürich since 2021.

What you are looking at

The canvas is crossed by a row of thin, upright trees, the most striking thing in the picture. They have been pollarded, cut back hard so that only the trunks remain, and their tops sprout knobbly clusters of new growth. Monet paints them in yellow-green and ocher, as if lit by low sun and furred with moss, and spaces them unevenly across the left half like a broken fence of vertical strokes. One taller tree at far left still keeps a fan of bare twigs, a lilac haze against the blue.

Behind the trees, a long farmhouse with a heavy rose-gray roof sits against the slope, its walls pale and chalky, a chimney at center. To the right, the hillside rises steeply in bands of ocher, rose and russet, lit full on by the winter sun, with a patch of white chalk showing through at the far right. The sky is a clear, cold blue with a few thin clouds.

In the foreground, things get more particular. A band of brilliant green grass runs across the lower canvas, startlingly fresh for winter. At lower right a rough wooden paling fence runs diagonally, painted in pale grays and blues, and beside it lies a heap of cut branches in rusty red. On the left, the ground is a tangle of reddish undergrowth and bare earth.

Where and when

Monet moved to Giverny in April 1883 with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family of children. In the first years, before the water garden existed, he painted the countryside around the village: the Seine and its islands, the meadows, the Epte, the small valleys cutting into the chalk hills. The Val de Falaise is one of these. Winter landscapes were a recurring subject in these years, among them Frost of the same year and, a little later, the frosty Grainstacks, White Frost Effect of 1888.

How this version differs

Monet's earlier snow scenes, at Argenteuil and Vétheuil, are often gray, white and muffled. This is a dry, bright winter: no snow, a hard blue sky, sun raking across the hill and turning it pink and gold. The color is closer to his southern pictures of the previous year at Bordighera than to the snowy landscapes of the 1870s, and the vertical rhythm of the trees looks ahead to the Poplars of 1891, where a row of thin trunks again structures the whole canvas.

How it was painted

The paint is applied in small, crisp strokes throughout, with little blending. On the hillside they run in parallel diagonals that follow the slope; in the grass they are short horizontal flicks of pure green; on the trees they are stacked vertical dabs that build up the knobbly trunks. Shadows are colored rather than dark: blue and violet on the house wall, lilac on the fence. The red of the signature echoes the brush heap and the undergrowth.

For Monet's first decade in the village and the paintings of its surroundings, see Giverny: Monet's House and Garden, and compare the summer valley of Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny, painted the same year.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to Gabriele and Werner Merzbacher, whose collection of Impressionist, Fauve and Expressionist works went on permanent loan to the Kunsthaus Zürich when the museum's new building by David Chipperfield opened in 2021. It is on display there. For other places to see Monet, see Where to See Monet's Paintings, and for the painter, Claude Monet.