The Pond, Snow Effect

Monet dated this canvas 75 at the lower left, and within weeks it was in a sale room. On 24 March 1875 he and three painter friends auctioned their work at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, and this snowy field near his home at Argenteuil went under the hammer as lot 15. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought it.

Its later story runs through Germany. By the early 1930s it belonged to Richard Semmel, a Jewish textile manufacturer in Berlin. In 1933, after he fled the Nazis for the Netherlands, Semmel sent it to auction in Amsterdam, where it was catalogued as Snow at Argenteuil and failed to sell. It then spent decades with a family in France. In 2022 Semmel's heirs and that family reached a settlement and the picture was sold at Christie's in New York, which is how it came to Potsdam. The people in it are still out walking in the midday sun, across the snow above the pond.