Snow at Argenteuil

Snow at Argenteuil is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet, dated about 1874, showing figures making their way along a lane during a snowfall; it is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession number 21.1329).

Monet lived in Argenteuil, a town on the Seine northwest of Paris, from the end of 1871, and painted the town and the banks of the river there extensively during the 1870s. Snow was a recurring motif there: during the winter of 1874–1875 alone he painted no fewer than eighteen views of the town under snow, a group to which the larger Snow at Argenteuil in the National Gallery, London, also belongs. According to the Boston museum, this smaller canvas, 54.6 by 73.7 cm, was painted not far from his house and was probably begun out of doors.

The museum reads the picture as a study of changing light and weather. Monet primed the canvas with a light grey ground that shows through the thinly brushed areas, and defined the houses, trees and people with quick dabs and broader sweeps of colour. A path leads the eye into the scene between a fence on the left and a meadow on the right, so that the viewer, like the walkers bent under an umbrella and like the painter himself, seems to stand in the cold, damp air. The museum links Monet's choice to show snow actually falling, rather than snow already settled, to the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

The painting is signed Claude Monet at lower left. Monet sold it to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris on 29 April 1890, and on 4 July of that year Durand-Ruel sold it to the Boston collector Anna Perkins Rogers. She left it to the Museum of Fine Arts, which accessioned it on 7 July 1921.