Three Women in the Snow

Breitner said he would paint the man in the street and the man at home, the streets and houses people built, life everywhere. He meant to become the painter of the people. This canvas, painted in Amsterdam around 1893, shows that ambition at close range. Three young women from a working district hurry through the snow, shawls pulled tight, one of them in a bright pink scarf. The snow is a rough white ground flecked with brown, and the figures are cut off below the waist, with no street or sky to place them. It is one of a series on this theme. The Musée d'Orsay owned only two Breitners, both acquired in the 1980s, when its friends' society gave this one in 2025 in memory of Sylvain Amic, the museum's president, who had admired it and died that August.