Schnee in Argenteuil

Monet painted this during the hard winter of 1874 and 1875, when he was living at Argenteuil, a town on the Seine just downstream from Paris that the railway had turned into a commuter suburb. That winter he went out into the cold again and again and came back with 18 snow scenes. This is the largest of them. It looks down the Boulevard Saint-Denis on a grey, fading afternoon, a few bundled figures trudging along a road churned into brown cart tracks, probably heading to or from the station nearby. He built the deep snow in the foreground with paint laid on thick, and kept nearly the whole picture to whites and greys warmed with faint pink. Someone has left a single spot of stronger colour out among the figures, and the eye goes straight to it.