Paris in the Snow

Snow fell on Paris on 24 February 1894, and the weather reports are how we date this picture. Gauguin had come back from Tahiti the previous summer and taken a second floor studio in Montparnasse, and the view is the one from that window: rooftops, bare trees, a street the colour of wet slush. On the shopfront in the background you can still read part of a sign, Neufs Occasions, new and secondhand goods. A few months later, in May 1894, the canvas left his hands. He gave it to Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Theo van Gogh's widow, who was living at Bussum in the Netherlands and keeping her late husband's collection together. That is why a Paris snowfall hangs today in a museum named after Vincent.