冬のサン=シメオン農場前の道

The winter of 1867 was hard, and a heavy snowfall around Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, sent the 26-year-old Monet outdoors to paint it. He made four snow scenes that season, his earliest attempt at working the same subject over and over, the habit that would later give us the haystacks and the cathedrals. A journalist who came upon him described a gentleman wrapped in three overcoats, hands gloved, face half frozen, sitting at his easel with a little foot-warmer, studying the snow. Nearby stood the inn at Saint-Simeon, a cheap gathering place for landscape painters since the railway had reached the coast a few years earlier. What he was after is here in the road itself, where the white of the snow is worked in greys and blues rather than left as the plain white of the sky above it.