Glaçons à Bougival

In the winter of 1867, Monet was 27, newly a father, and almost broke. The Salon had turned his work down, and he was painting outdoors in the cold near Bougival, where the Seine had frozen into drifting sheets of ice. He worked fast, in a grey, almost colourless range, the pale water barely separated from the misty sky above it. This comes more than ten years before the celebrated ice-floe pictures he would make at Vétheuil, so it catches him testing the subject early. It reached the Louvre through a private gift, the collection of Hélène and Victor Lyon, which is why one of Monet's frozen rivers hangs there rather than across the water at the Orsay.