Paisaje con nieve

Van Gogh came south chasing sunlight and found snow. A man in a black hat and his brown dog walk into the thaw, and we seem to follow right behind them.

The story behind the painting

When Vincent van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, record cold had left the ground covered in snow. By the time he painted this picture the snow had begun to melt. It is believed to be one of the first paintings he made in Arles. In a letter to his brother Theo around 24 February 1888, he described finishing three paintings in as many days, one of them 'a landscape in the snow'. He was 35 and about to enter the most productive stretch of his career. The south was very different from the Netherlands and Paris, and he hoped its brilliant light would simplify forms into the kind of pattern he admired in Japanese woodblock prints. The scene shows the La Crau plain with Montmajour and hills on the horizon.

What to look for

Start at the lower left corner, where a road enters the picture and leads your eye toward the trees, the hills and the snow-covered mountains on the horizon. Horizontal brushstrokes stress the flat plain that fills most of the canvas, while the diagonal strokes of the road cut across it and create tension. Look at how the snow is made of white and violet, and how brown, green and blue suggest puddles and slush left by the thaw. Yellow tufts of grass line the roadside. Small accents bring it alive: red roofs along the horizon, a brown dog, and a man in a brown jacket and black hat walking through the field. The horizon sits high, keeping our attention on the land leading up to the house.

Meaning and intent

Van Gogh was an avid collector of Japanese woodcut prints, and he may have been inspired by their snowy scenes. Yet this painting also holds on to the habits of Dutch landscape, with dark greens and browns in the foreground and blue in the sky. It stands at a meeting point: a northern painter newly arrived in the south, still using the colours of home while reaching toward a new way of seeing. The high horizon and the focus on the ground make the view feel personal, almost as if van Gogh were walking behind the man and dog himself. Rather than a grand vista, it offers the experience of a first walk in an unfamiliar land.

Legacy

Landscape with Snow is one of at least ten snowy landscapes, in oil and watercolour, that van Gogh made between 1882 and 1889. A few days after painting it, following a new snowstorm, he painted a similar but less detailed scene, Snowy Landscape with Arles in the Background. Today it belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In September 2017 the White House asked the Guggenheim to borrow the painting for the president's private living quarters; the museum's chief curator, Nancy Spector, declined and offered instead a gold toilet sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. Beyond that episode, the painting matters as a doorway into the Arles period, the very first glimpse of the south that would transform his art.

¿Sabías que…?

It is believed to be one of van Gogh's first paintings in Arles.
He mentioned 'a landscape in the snow' in a letter to Theo around 24 February 1888.
The snow is painted in white and violet.
It belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Wikipedia · Wikidata