The Snow-Covered Boulevard de Pontoise in Argenteuil

When he painted this, Monet was living in Argenteuil, a fast-growing town on the railway just north-west of Paris, where he spent most of the 1870s. The winters of those years gave him a subject he returned to often: snow. This is the Boulevard de Pontoise, an ordinary suburban street under a fresh fall, with a few figures muffled up and making their way along it. There is little event in it, and the interest lies in how he handles the white, which is never simply white but shot through with blue, grey and faint violet in the shadows. Working outdoors in that cold meant painting fast, before the light shifted over the snow and before the paint stiffened on the brush.