Description
Garden under Snow – a canvas from the fifth impressionist exhibition
A snow-covered garden in an almost monochrome painting: white, pale grey and bluish, with a few muted green strokes. Below lies an open field of snow with some tufts of grass and a low bush at the left edge. A row of bare, thin trees crosses the middle; the tallest reach the upper edge of the canvas. Behind them appear the snow-covered roofs of low buildings and a long pale wall. Further back stand more bare trees and a grey sky that merges with the snow, so that no horizon can be seen. The strokes are short and parallel. The work is held by the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest under inventory number 204.B; it was painted in 1879.
Shown at the fifth impressionist exhibition
The museum record states that this canvas, completed in 1879, was shown the following year at the fifth impressionist exhibition. That is not a remark about taste but a fact about where the painter stood at the time: among the impressionists, and not yet among the company he is known for today.
Before the flat areas and the outlines
Anyone who knows his later Breton and Tahitian paintings will miss here everything by which those are recognised: there are no large unbroken areas of colour, no dark outlines, no strong contrasts. In their place is a fine parallel stroke and a thin layer of paint. It is the same painter ten years earlier.
The museum places him beside Pissarro and Cézanne
The record also explains where this manner came from. The painter studied closely the landscapes Camille Pissarro painted around 1870, and the compositions of Paul Cézanne, whom he admired all his life. His own collection held works by both. The winter landscape was therefore made during the learning and not after it.
The only warm colour on the whole canvas
In the entire painting there are just two small orange-pink marks, both on a roof behind the trees. Everything else is cold. It is precisely because of those two specks that the field of snow reads as white rather than grey; without them the canvas would lose the measure by which the eye judges every other tone.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every painting here is made by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the snow is the hardest part: it has to look white although there is almost no white in it, but bluish and grey tones that must not merge. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval. Nothing on these pages is printed; the colour is mixed and laid on again for each canvas.
- Subject: a snow-covered garden with bare trees and snowy roofs behind them.
- Technique: oil on canvas, short parallel strokes in cold tones.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 30 cm to 200 x 150 cm; 80 x 60 cm and 100 x 75 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: by the museum record it was shown at the fifth impressionist exhibition.
From the same early years, see also Winter Landscape (Vinterlandskap), Interior from the Artist’s Home, rue Carcel and The Market Gardens of Vaugirard. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 60.5 x 81 cm.
