The Impressionists are remembered for summer, for poppy fields and sunlight on the river. Winter was harder on them, and most of them went out into it anyway, easels planted in the snow. A snowy road in a London suburb was painted by a refugee while enemy soldiers occupied the house he had fled, and a frosted field was jeered at in 1874 as palette scrapings on a dirty canvas.
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Why Snow Was Never White
Snow set the Impressionists one of their hardest problems. A white field has hardly any color that is truly its own. It takes its color from the sky and from everything around it, so its shadows can turn blue or violet, and a painter who reaches for plain white paint loses the light.
The French had a name for such a picture, an effet de neige, a snow effect. It also came with a deadline. A thaw could turn the snow to mud overnight, so the painter had to work fast, often outdoors in the cold.
The rule of selection is simple: a painter who showed with the Impressionists in Paris or learned the style there, and a canvas in which snow, frost or river ice covers the ground and sets the light.
Between 1870 and 1902, that rule leads from the villages west of Paris to a London suburb, central France and New York.
12. Paul Gauguin, Snow, Rue Carcel (1883)
Snow covers a small garden behind a row of Paris houses. A fence crosses it, a few bare trees stand in it, and the sky above is a flat gray. Nothing in Snow, Rue Carcel suggests that the man who painted it had just lost his job.
Until 1882, Paul Gauguin painted only in his spare time. His days belonged to the Paris stock exchange, where his guardian, Gustave Arosa, had found him a place as a stockbroker's agent. His canvases were nonetheless good enough to hang with the Impressionists in 1880, 1881 and 1882.
Then, in 1882, the stock exchange crashed and Gauguin lost his position. He took the blow as a chance to give himself entirely to painting. His finances never recovered.
So the garden he painted the following winter was his own, behind the family home on the Rue Carcel, in Vaugirard, a district on the southern edge of Paris. In 1881 he had painted the rooms of the house there, and his wife and children in this same garden. In 1883 he painted the garden twice more, empty and white.
To me, the empty garden says more than the family scene of two years before. It belonged to a man with a wife, five children and no salary.
Before long the family left for Denmark, home of his wife, Mette, to seek help from her relatives. A year later Gauguin was back in Paris with only his eldest son. Mette kept the four younger children with her in Denmark.
At a Glance
Artist: Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903)
Painted: 1883
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 60 × 50 cm (23.6 × 19.7 in)
Where to see it: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
11. Camille Pissarro, Fox Hill, Upper Norwood (1870)
In the winter of 1870, Camille Pissarro set up his easel in the middle of Fox Hill, a curving road in Upper Norwood, in south London, and painted the snow in front of him. He had not crossed the Channel to paint. That autumn the Prussian army had invaded the country around Paris, his house at Louveciennes lay in its path, and he had fled with his family, leaving hundreds of his paintings behind.