Un carro sulla strada innevata a Honfleur

Monet was 27 and mostly broke when he painted this in the winter of 1867, working outdoors along a road near Honfleur on the Normandy coast. Snow was a subject he kept returning to that season, the way it flattens a landscape into greys and off-whites and swallows the horizon. Here a horse and cart plod down a rutted lane between snow-laden trees, a couple of small figures the only sign of warmth in the cold. This is years before the word Impressionism existed, coined by a hostile critic in 1874, yet the interest is already here, the whole picture built from the pale, shifting light of one overcast day rather than from the details of the scene.