Claude Monet, 'Snow Scene at Argenteuil', 1875

In 1871 Monet moved with his family to Argenteuil, a suburb north-west of Paris that was connected to the capital by a 15-minute train journey. During his six-year stay there he painted around 200 pictures of the town and its surroundings. He depicted the ordinary streets, the road bridge, the railway bridge with stream trains puffing across it, river walks and smart villas. The rapidly expanding suburb was known as a popular destination for summer day trips and pleasure boating, but it was not an untouched rural idyll as it also had factories, an ironworks and a brick works that brought wealth to the area.

This picture is one of 18 Argenteuil canvases that record the snowy winter of 1874/5. It shows the Boulevard Saint-Denis, near Monet’s home, looking towards its junction with the rue de la Voie des Bans, with the Seine beyond. As he worked, Monet would have had his back to the railway station which brought pleasure trippers and commuters to and from Paris. The figures trudging along the road may be making their way to or from the trains, the snow halting their progress to a snail’s pace, while wavy brown cart tracks snake into the distance, drawing our eye towards the horizon, where distant buildings seem to dissolve in the mist. The snow and fog mask the fact that this is a thoroughly modern suburb, where the road is lined with houses that had been built quite recently.

The picture is the largest of the Argenteuil snow scenes; when Monet worked on a larger scale he was often more interested in achieving a generalised effect than in portraying individual elements. So while some of the smaller snow scenes painted that year are more richly detailed and full of anecdote, this painting focuses instead on atmosphere. It is an overcast afternoon and the sun is slowly fading from the sky. The palette is almost monochromatic, the whites, blues and greys warmed with pink tones. Occasional touches of stronger colour distributed across the canvas serve to bind the composition together. Dabs of red in the trees on the left are repeated in the cart tracks in the middle and the trees on the right. The blue of the central figure is also repeated in the windows of the church, the tracks and the trees. Monet would have brushed in the ground and sky before delineating the tree branches and the cart tracks with spare calligraphic strokes. The paint on the road in the foreground is thicker than elsewhere in the picture, perhaps because Monet was trying to suggest the physical presence of deep snow.