【Impressionist Painting】Monet: Snow Scene

**Large size can only be delivered.** ＊The mounting process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Orders may take 2-3 weeks to be processed. Please be patient. Artist: Monet Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the representative painters of French Impressionism. He was one of the most influential painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His works show a deep understanding and mastery of color and light and shadow effects, as well as sensitivity and creativity to natural landscapes. Monet's works are based on outdoor landscapes, especially his waterscapes in the Gabriel Coast and Giverny Gardens. He constantly observed the changes in light and color in natural scenery, and used colorful blocks of color and delicate brushstrokes to depict the beauty and changes of nature. His pursuit of light and color has become one of the representative characteristics of Impressionist art. Monet traveled to different times and places, and inspired by his travel experiences, he created many famous works, such as "Water Lilies" and "Maize", etc. His works were highly praised by many artists at the time, and became classics in the history of art in later times, which had a profound impact on the development of art in later generations. In general, Monet is one of the representative figures among French Impressionist painters. His works are based on the changes of colors and natural scenery, showing a deep understanding and feeling of nature, and have an important influence on the development of art history. Title of the work: Snowy landscape on the Vétheuil route, sleet on the neige Output photo paper: Art micro-spray snow surface art photo paper Dimensions: 82 x 60 cm ＊Other sizes can be customized. Original dimensions: 24 1/8 x 32 1/8 in. (61.1 x 81.1 cm.) Year of creation: Painted in Vétheuil in 1879 https://canvypro.blob.core.windows.net/thumbs/a555a453b6d84446bc3a571e0e817ff6.jpg Monet painted this exquisitely detailed winter snow scene at Vetheuil in 1879. That year was the first full year he spent in Vetheuil, a rural town about sixty kilometers northwest of Paris. He set up his easel on the road leading to the nearby village of La Roche-Guillot and looked in the direction of Vetheuil. The house he and his family rented is the third one on the left, visible just below the twin towers of the villa Les Tourelles, owned by his landlord Eve Elliott. This painting is the first in a series of three, painted from approximately the same viewpoint, exploring the transformation of a winter landscape over the course of a few days (Wildenstein, nos. 509-510; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum of Fine Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden). In the latter two paintings, the snow has begun to melt, revealing muddy ground; in this painting, by contrast, the village is still covered in a thick blanket of snow, and the white sky suggests another snowstorm is about to arrive. Monet uses delicate whites interwoven with silver, blue, and purple brushstrokes to depict the fleeting effects of a recent snowfall; tracks in the snow, rendered in light reddish-yellow-brown brushstrokes, are the only warm tonal contrast in this wintry scene. The overall impression is of a frozen world, quiet, serene, and still. The road enters from the lower right of the painting, winding into the depths, drawing the viewer into the icy landscape. The trees and shrubs in the foreground act as a spatial illusion of the painting, accentuating the rapid receding of the road and the contrast between near and far. In the midground, the houses of the village are scattered to the right of the road, acting as a horizontal contrast to the rapid passage into the depths. Further away, the snow-capped Mt. Chenay rises in the distance, as if blocking all travel beyond the end of the village street. Just where the road curves into Vetheuil and disappears from view, there is a solitary figure – clad in black, boldly silhouetted against the illusory landscape. He trudges through the snow, the only contrast between movement and stillness in the scene. He seems to be walking from the village to the vast, empty foreground, perhaps by proxy, towards his subject. The painting bears witness to one of the central tenets of Impressionism and one of its most persuasive myths: the master sketching from nature, quickly recording his immediate feelings. A journalist wrote after his winter encounter with Monet: "It was cold enough to split stone. We saw a foot warmer, then an easel, then a gentleman packed in three coats, gloves, his face almost frozen; it was Monet studying snow effects" (quoted from G. Tinterow, The Origins of Impressionism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994 exhibition catalogue, pp. 249-250). The three years that Monet spent at Vetheuil, from August 1878 to December 1881, were an important moment of artistic reassessment for the Impressionist painter, who was entering middle age. The village at the time had only six hundred inhabitants, less than one-tenth the population of Argentie, the bustling suburb where he had previously lived and worked. Moreover, Vetheuil had no train station and little industry, so there was little evidence of the modernisation that was gradually destroying the tranquillity and natural beauty of the countryside. Soon after arriving at Vetheuil, Monet described his new home as "a charming place where I should be able to discover something nice" (quoted from Monet: The Seine and the Sea, 1878-1883, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003, p. 17). Although he faced personal difficulties during his first two years at Vetheuil - his wife Camille became seriously ill and died in September 1879, and his financial situation was difficult - his optimistic predictions about his artistic prospects proved accurate. At Vetheuil, Monet abandoned the scenes of modern life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argentee and began to focus on capturing the transient in nature, adopting an emerging serial technique that laid the foundation for his most important later work. Carol McNamara writes: "The acknowledged painter of contemporary life who had settled in Vetheuil in 1878, he left the town in 1881 having emerged from his cocoon renewed and reoriented" (quoted in McNamara, Monet: The Seine and the Sea, 1878-1883, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 1998 exhibition catalogue, p. 86). Although Monet dated the painting "1879", it remains uncertain whether he painted it at the beginning or end of the year. Wildenstein attributes this and two other related views to early 1879, Monet's first winter at Vetheuil, and places them with three paintings of the village church in the snow (nos. 505-507; Frick Collection, New York, and two paintings, Musee d'Orsay, Paris). However, Eliza Rathbun points out that weather conditions were more severe at the end of the year, subjecting Europe to a Siberian-like climate, and she proposes that Monet painted the three Rue Vetheuil paintings after a snowstorm in early December 1879, before beginning a series of paintings of the frozen Seine (Exhibition Catalogue, ibid., 1998, p. 106). The bad weather of 1879 began in the fall, with long periods of rainy weather forcing Monet to paint still lifes indoors. In mid-November 1879, the temperature dropped sharply and remained in severe cold until the beginning of January, when it suddenly thawed. Snow began to fall on November 29 and continued throughout December. The snow piled up deeper and deeper, making roads impassable, trains unable to carry goods, and fuel and food supplies began to run short. An almanac of the time reported: "Snow fell during the first ten days of the month, especially from the third to the fifth day; there were terrible blizzards in several places at the time, and communications in several places were interrupted for two or three days" (cited from the above publication, pp. 227-228). Although Monet had previously painted snow scenes in Argentie and the Normandy coast, the subject took on new meaning for him at Vetheuil. The freezing weather kept most villagers indoors, allowing him to explore the rural landscape without human habitation. At the same time, he seemed to find a personal resonance in the winter silence, a sense of peace beyond the mundane, and a pictorial metaphor for his own grief for Camille’s suffering. In January 1880, when the ice on the Seine suddenly broke into huge fragments and the river flooded its banks, Monet painted nearly 20 views of this catastrophic event. “The paintings seem full of cries of pain and surprise, sighs of resignation and odes of hope,” Paul Tucker wrote. “They suggest the shattering and rupture of the past… These feelings are certainly what the place inspires, but they are also undoubtedly the result of this important period in Monet’s life” (Claude Monet: Life and Art, New York, 1995, pp. 103-105). In addition to the profound impact on Monet's personal change and artistic renewal, the years he spent at Vetheuil also saw a complete reassessment of his professional strategy. His income in 1879 was only half of what it had been earlier in the decade, but his responsibilities were greater—in addition to supporting his two sons, he also had to care for Alice Auchedet and her six children. Alice and her children had moved to Vetheuil to live with Monet and Camille, while her husband ran his bankrupt textile business in Paris. His financial situation was so difficult that he borrowed fifty francs from the local postmaster and trudged through deep snow to Paris on December 28, 1879 (just three days after his first Christmas without Camille) to try to sell some of his winter landscapes. The trip was a minor success, with dealer Georges Puty and critic Théodore Duret each purchasing a painting for the total of 450 francs. Over the next few months, Monet explored a variety of new marketing strategies. Although he remained a staunch supporter of Impressionist methods and goals—"I have always been, and always will be, an Impressionist," he declared—he withdrew from the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880, frustrated by the group politics, scant sales, and hostile press at past shows. Instead, he risked the scorn of his avant-garde peers by attempting to participate in the annual state-sponsored Salon for the first time in a decade. The jury rejected the more experimental of the two paintings he had submitted (which he claimed was more to his taste) and accepted the other ("more banal"). With the help of some well-placed friends, he persuaded publisher Georges Charentier to mount a one-man show in the fashionable gallery of his journal, L'Été d'Art Moderne, featuring the rejected painting—a gloomy sunset view of ice on the Seine (Wildenstein, no. 576; Petit Palais, Paris). Monet's efforts to expand his clientele paid off handsomely, and by the time he and Alice left Vétheuil for Poissy in the autumn of 1881, his financial situation had improved. The landscape may have found a buyer as early as April 1880—according to Wildenstein, the art dealer Jules Lucquet. By 1882, the painting had almost certainly entered the collection of Paul Durand-Ruel, a major supporter of Impressionism, who had recently received support from the Banque de l'Union, restoring his funds after five difficult years. That same year, the painting was likely shown in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition, one of eight epoch-making exhibitions that introduced the revolutionary formal vocabulary of the new painting to the French public. In 1913, Rue d’Vétheuil, Snow Effect became one of five Monet paintings to appear in an even more important exhibition—the now legendary Armory Show, named after the Armory in New York where it was held. Organized by the American Association of Painters and Sculptors, the show represented a sensational introduction of European modernism to American audiences, who until then had known little about the bold new directions being developed in studios across the Atlantic by Matisse, Duchamp, Brancusi, and others. By then, Monet and his colleagues had been hailed as the founders of the modern movement, and a special exhibition of their work in Hall O of the Armory Show was devoted to their work, which the organizers hoped would bring support rather than ridicule to the current vanguard. It was likely at the Armory Show that The Road to Vetheuil, Snow Effect caught the eye of New Orleans sugar magnate Hunter Henderson, whose sister Ellen purchased the painting that same year as part of the family’s growing and increasingly expansive collection. The painting has remained in the Henderson family since 1913, a lasting testimony to the pioneering and discerning eye of this American collector. **Basic full-page mounting instructions: Seven aluminum frames are available** ＊Basic mounting/bare mounting. It means there is no Acrylic protection. https://image-cdn-flare.qdm.cloud/q665027dd6a3a4/image/data/2023/07/11/4b853563c2267abe4f46e392cf820e6b.jpg https://image-cdn-flare.qdm.cloud/q665027dd6a3a4/image/data/2023/11/24/2cc6b1cb3c7d678323915c04e8c9505b.jpg **Aluminum frame back details:** https://image-cdn-flare.qdm.cloud/q665027dd6a3a4/image/data/2022/04/12/c6d34fbc231337ab8da27935ab4f31db.jpg