Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · 1880
A huge orange sun sits low over the frozen Seine and throws a shivering reflection across the water. On the far bank, the houses of Lavacourt are reduced to a few pale strokes under a sky of violet and blue, and in the foreground broken slabs of ice drift past. Monet was living at Vétheuil, on the opposite bank, during the terrible winter of 1879 to 1880, when the river froze solid and then broke up in a dramatic thaw. He painted the ice floes again and again, and this is the largest and most ambitious of the series.
The painting is remarkable for how little it describes and how much it conveys. The village is barely there; the real subject is the cold air, the water and the light. Look at how the sun is painted as a single flat disc of colour, almost like a coin, and how its reflection is built from short vertical touches that get cooler as they move away from the centre. The sky is thinly brushed while the water and the banks are worked in thicker paint, so that the canvas itself seems to have a surface of ice.
Monet painted this picture in the studio, working from smaller studies, with the Salon of 1880 in mind. He submitted it and it was refused, though a quieter picture of Lavacourt was accepted. The composition inevitably recalls Impression, Sunrise of 1872, the painting that gave the movement its name, and it stands as a kind of monumental answer to it. The dealer and collector Edward Brandus gave the painting to the Petit Palais in 1906, when Monet's reputation was finally secure. Stand back and the sun seems to glow; step close and it dissolves into a handful of strokes.
Did You Know? Monet painted this for the official Salon of 1880, his first submission in ten years, and the jury turned it down as too sketchy.
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