Snow at Argenteuil

The snow in this picture is still coming down. Monet painted it around 1874, not far from his house at Argenteuil, the town on the Seine just outside Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts points out that he chose a snowfall in progress over the usual winter scene of snow already lying on the ground. The museum connects that choice to Japanese woodblock prints, which painters in Paris were collecting in those years and in which snow is often shown still falling through the air. A path leads you into the scene, and a fence and a strip of meadow close it in at the side, so that, like the people walking there and like Monet at his easel, you are out in the cold, damp air. He probably began it outdoors. The canvas was primed a light grey, and in places the strokes are so thin that the grey ground shows through between them.