El pañuelo rojo

This began as a different picture. Monet first painted two people seated inside a room on either side of a window, then painted them out entirely. In their place he put his wife Camille, seen through the glass from inside, walking past in the cold with a red scarf over her head and turning to look in as she passes. It is the only snow scene Monet is known to have made with Camille in it. She was his constant model in these years around 1870, before illness took her young, and he kept this canvas in his own studio for the rest of his life rather than sell it. The whole grey, frosted picture is arranged so your eye lands on that one warm patch of red.