Winter Landscape at the Val de Falaise (Giverny)

By the winter of 1885, Claude Monet had been living at Giverny for about two years, having moved his household there in 1883. This is one of the snow scenes he painted in those first winters, out in the Val de Falaise, a small valley just below the village. Monet worked these effects of snow outdoors, in the cold, chasing the way white light flattens a landscape and drains its colour. What the painting doesn't show is any hint of the Giverny the world now knows. The water garden with its lily pond and Japanese bridge was still eight years off. Here the place is just a bare valley under snow, its slopes gone soft and grey.