Landscape in Winter

Courbet signed this small snow piece in the lower left corner and dated it 68. Over the winter of 1868 into 1869, a 28-year-old Claude Monet was working near Étretat on the Normandy coast and painted The Magpie, a snowy field with a single black-and-white bird perched on a gate. The Musée d'Orsay, which owns Monet's canvas, notes that Courbet had taken on snow with great success not long before, and that Monet left out what Courbet usually set in it, the forest and the hunt. In this picture Courbet left them out as well. It has no hunter and no animal, only a stand of firs bowed under fresh snow beside an open field, on a canvas about 30 by 40 centimetres.