Derretimentos de Gelo, Arredores de Bennecourt, França (Glaçons, Environs de Bennecourt) - Claude Monet

 

Derretimentos de Gelo, Arredores de Bennecourt, França (Glaçons, Environs de Bennecourt) - Claude Monet
Bennecourt - França
Coleção privada
OST - 40x54 - 1893




Among Monet’s most celebrated and visually spectacular canvases are his depictions of ice on the Seine. Taking the approach he had developed only three years before in his great Haystacks paintings, Monet produced a series of thirteen river views that capture the spectacle of the frozen Seine in different weather and at different times of day. Monet painted the present work in early 1893, when the large sheets of ice had begun to break apart on the surface, creating a striking interplay between water, land and sky. His exploration of the surface of the water with the ice floating upon it marks the beginning of an idea that would see full realisation in his later Nymphéas. By the end of the month, the thaw brought Monet’s campaign to an abrupt end, leaving the artist with several unfinished compositions that he would have to complete in his studio. The present composition is one of the most beautiful of the series, showing the scene lit by sunlight with the glassy blue of the water mediated by the crisp white of the diminishing ice floes.
The months preceding this series of canvases were relatively unproductive. Monet’s marriage to Alice Hoschéde and the ensuing combination of their households proved a distraction. It was not until the river froze and presented the artist with a new opportunity, that Monet felt compelled to return to work: ‘During this period of renewed enthusiasm, Monet produced thirteen views of ice floes on the Seine that are remarkable for their delicate atmospheric effects and energetic brushwork. Monet, as he had since 1865, braved the elements and produced these extraordinary studies of weather in rather frigid conditions […]. For over two weeks in January of 1893, the Seine went through a period of freezing and thawing that produced dramatic ice floes. These pieces of ice floated for several days, and inspired Monet to produce these subtle atmospheric studies. Painted on the Bennecourt bank of the river, across from Giverny, Monet executed nine examples that face towards the hills on the left bank with subtle changes of site, time of day, and atmosphere […]. In these paintings, the river is filled with snowcapped ice floes, and provides a fascinating combination of ice, water, and cold mist. These works are a triumph of atmosphere. Despite the similar compositions of this series, they are each distinguished by their delicate palettes which vary individually from ice-blue, mauve, and pink of a frigid day on the river to warmer tones of yellow and blue when the sun attempts to melt the thick ice that floats on the water’.
Monet had painted similar scenes much earlier in his career, at Bougival in 1868 and then at Lavacourt, near Vétheuil, in 1879-80. Yet, as Paul Hayes Tucker observes, the later paintings are a very different body of work: ‘Vaguely similar to paintings that Monet had done in the winter of 1879-80, when a similar cold had frozen the river, these Ice Floes pictures are what one might expect from someone who had not been challenged in quite a long time but who was determined to reinvigorate himself, even to the point of painting outdoors in temperatures that were well below freezing. They are at once elegiac and soothing, appropriately familiar in their composition and handling while striking in their colouring and their chilling atmospheric effects’.
Indeed, comparison with this earlier series shows the gradual refinement of Monet’s approach over the years. Whilst the earlier scenes have a remarkable immediacy, there is a notably more nuanced approach to light in the paintings of 1892-93. Where brushstrokes were once looser and more clearly defined, they are now finely blended one into another. By the 1890s Monet’s painstaking investigations had paid off; in these paintings he succeeds for the first time in capturing the elusive envelope – the atmosphere itself.
In turning to winter and snow scenes in this quest, Monet was not alone. The subject had an early and important place in the Impressionist artists’ œuvres, though for most of them they would not maintain this fascination in their later works. Monet, exceptionally, would return to scenes of snow and ice as the nineteenth-century ended and the twentieth-century began. Charles S. Moffett examined the appearance of the snow scene in the Impressionist movement in his exploration of winter scenes in European art history: ‘Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte, Gauguin, and others focused on the very particular character of the air, the light, and the appearance of colour in landscapes that were blanketed with white. Their snowscapes represent the first sustained interest in the subject since that of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. With a few notable exceptions, however, most of these earlier paintings are not about the defining characteristics of the snowscape but rather about a wide range of human activities in the context of a landscape covered with snow. The Impressionists, on the other hand, were drawn to the subject because of its unique visual characteristics. The subtleties of light and colour offered an opportunity to work in a range of often muted colour that brings to mind Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ in particular colours or combinations of colour. The Impressionists concentrated not on ideas about the thing but the thing itself’.
It is true that Monet’s approach has little to connect it with seventeenth century examples or the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Freidrich in which the physical aspect is suborned to an expression of human emotion. His focus remained technical, examining how the experience of seeing, or being in a landscape, could be rendered in paint. As his correspondence on the subject attests, he tirelessly experimented with what could be achieved through painting, exploring and consistently testing the boundaries of his craft. This approach to landscape would have a powerful impact on later artists; when Gerhard Richter began his interrogation of landscape painting in photographic age, it was to Monet he turned and his depiction of icebergs provides a powerful parallel to Monet’s work in its precise and compelling evocation of atmosphere.
Monet’s series paintings from the 1890s are widely considered his finest and most innovative achievements. By painting the same subject at various times of day and under different weather conditions, he could document the continual transformation of his surroundings. His painting of Les Glaçons, Bennecourt and the related canvases coincided with his series of depictions of Rouen Cathedral, and both undertakings reveal similarities in palette and approach. Monet would apply the lessons he learned from these pictures to later series of misty mornings on the Seine and ultimately to his depictions of the waterlilies in his garden at Giverny. Perhaps more than any of the series from this decade, the ice floe pictures laid the groundwork for his approach to rendering the floating lilypads and the reflection of the trees and sky in the garden pond.
For a large part of the twentieth century, this work was owned by French banker André Wormser and his family. Wormser had an extensive collection including works by Renoir, Manet and Degas. A number of these appear in the background of a painting by Edouard Vuillard showing Olga Wormser with their four children at the family home on the rue Scheffer in Paris. Glaçons, environs de Bennecourt is visible in the background, behind Madame Wormser.