Early Snow in Louveciennes

In 1897 Hugo von Tschudi, the new director of the National Gallery in Berlin, bought this snow scene from the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel. He was bringing French Impressionists into a Prussian state museum against the taste of the Kaiser, and the friction helped end his time in Berlin in 1909.

Sisley had painted it around 1870 or 1871 at Louveciennes, a village on the hill west of Paris. The snow has come early. The trees are still in leaf, the white has settled on the roofs and only in patches on the road, chimneys are smoking and a few people trudge along. Louveciennes was in fact a busy suburb with its own railway line, though little of that reaches the picture.

In 1936 the Berlin museum let it go. It was one of five paintings traded to Fritz Nathan, a dealer in St. Gallen in Switzerland, for a small canvas by Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, which is still in Berlin.