Os cortadores de gelo

Before refrigeration, this was how you kept things cold in summer. Men sawed thick slabs from a frozen pond in winter and packed them in sawdust to last the warm months. J. Alden Weir painted that vanished labor in 1895, most likely on or near his farm at Branchville in rural Connecticut, where he escaped New York. He was one of the American painters who brought a loose Impressionist touch back from France, and he was close to John Twachtman, another painter of winter scenes, whose feel for muted whites shows here. Weir was also studying Japanese prints, and it tells in the flat, daring design and the high snowbank that crops the pond. Two men bend to the ice, a horse waits at the top of the slope, and a dog crosses the snow.