Landscape with Snow

Landscape with Snow is a small oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh, made in Arles in February 1888, among the first pictures he painted after arriving in the south; it is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Thannhauser Collection).

Van Gogh left Paris in mid-February 1888 hoping for the light and colour of Provence, but found snow on the ground at Arles; Theo told their sister that Vincent had found 50 cm of snow yet had already made three studies. In a letter of around 24 February Vincent mentioned three paintings finished in as many days, one of them a landscape in the snow, and this may be that study. It shows the flat La Crau plain with a man in a dark hat and his dog walking along a path towards farmhouses with red roofs on the horizon.

The Guggenheim's researchers note echoes both of the snow scenes in the Japanese prints Van Gogh collected and of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, in the shift from dark foreground to blue sky and the diagonal path. Unlike a Dutch panorama, though, the view stays close to the ground, as if the painter were walking behind the man and dog, and the changing direction of the strokes recalls his reed-pen drawings. Technical study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found that eosin red, a light-sensitive pigment, has faded: pinks have turned pale or white and violets bluish, so the picture has lost much of the contrast of pink against green and yellow against purple that it once had.

The canvas measures 38.2 × 46.2 cm. It surfaced in 1927 in a group of Van Gogh paintings published by the cataloguer Jacob Baart de la Faille, at a time when many fakes were circulating, and was later handled by the dealer Justin K. Thannhauser. The analysis supported its authenticity: the canvas closely matches that of View of a Butcher's Shop, painted in the same first days in Arles, and bears a hidden stamp of the Paris colourman Tasset et L'Hôte. Hilde Thannhauser gave it to the Guggenheim in 1984.