Effect of Snow on Petit-Montrouge

Manet painted this in the winter of 1870, and he painted it as a soldier. When Prussian armies surrounded Paris that autumn, cutting off food and firewood, Manet joined the National Guard, and this bleak little view of snow over the southern edge of the city, the district of Petit-Montrouge, is what he made between watches. It is barely a picture in the usual sense, a few dark figures on a whitened road under a heavy sky, worked quickly out of doors in the cold. Manet rarely painted landscapes and rarely worked outside at all, so this is unusual for him. He seems to have sent it off almost like a letter to family, a small report on how the siege felt from inside it.