Ice Floes

The Seine froze in the middle of January 1893, and Monet went out onto the bank near Giverny to paint the ice. On the 23rd the thaw began. The next day he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to complain that it had come too soon, that he had four or five canvases going and not one of them was anywhere near finished.

He carried on indoors from what he had. By the end of February there were more than a dozen pictures of the breaking ice, and this is one of them, a metre wide.

Durand-Ruel bought it from him and in February 1897 sold it in Paris to Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, the New York sugar family who were buying Impressionist pictures while most American collectors still wanted Barbizon landscapes. Louisine Havemeyer left it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929, along with nearly 2,000 other objects.