Claude Monet – Ice Floes
It looks like we’re getting a good start to winter here in Montreal, with a record snowfall yesterday of 45 centimetres – when you factor in the snowdrifts, that’s a pretty impressive one-off, the snow was up to mid-thigh in the alley behind where I live. Now, it’s no winter of 1892 but hey, we make do.
Ice Floes – Claude Monet
The prolonged freeze and heavy snowfalls in the winter of 1892–93 inspired Monet to capture their effects on the Seine in a series of paintings for which he chose a vantage point not far from his home in Giverny. The river had frozen in mid-January but began to thaw on the 23rd; the following day, in a letter to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, Monet lamented that “the thaw came too soon for me . . . the results—just four or five canvases and they are far from complete.” By the end of February, however, he had finished more than a dozen paintings, including this view of the melting ice floes.
– the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Actually, Montreal did break the record yesterday for the most snow in a single storm (or for the entire month of December for that matter) as far back as anyone’s been keeping track, so I guess it was more snowy than 1892. No sign of Claude Monet, though.
