Effet de neige à Petit-Montrouge

Grey sky, dirty snow, a church tower on the horizon. Manet painted this rare landscape as a soldier in besieged Paris, cold and hungry, and gave it to a comrade.

The story behind the painting

In July 1870 France declared war on Prussia. After the defeat at Sedan, Manet, a committed Republican, sent his mother, wife and son to safety in the Pyrenees and stayed in Paris, enlisting in the National Guard. From 19 September the city was surrounded, and his letters had to leave by balloon. At first he wrote with some patriotic confidence about drills and sentry duty on the fortifications. Later he complained of boredom and the rising cost of food, suffered a foot ailment, and wrote to his wife that he was gradually dying of hunger. During this siege he painted this winter view of Petit-Montrouge.

What to look for

The picture is split into two halves. Above is an almost monochrome grey sky. Below, rough brushstrokes of black, brown, ochre and white build a snowy field, calmer on the right and with a mound of earth on the left, which may allude to the war. Between them runs a line of buildings, with the bell tower of the church of Saint-Pierre de Montrouge at the centre and its crossing tower to the right. There is no green and no strong light, so there are almost no shadows. Wikipedia gives the canvas as 61.6 by 50.4 cm; Wikidata gives 59.7 by 49.7 cm.

Meaning and intent

Unlike the history painters of his day, Manet shows no heroic battle and almost no military figures, only the dim atmosphere of a fight that is coming. The image is read as reflecting his loss of hope in the military situation, his deep loneliness and the hardship he endured. It is one of the few landscapes in his work and one of his first paintings made outdoors. In the lower left he wrote a dedication, to my friend H. Charlet, and the date 28 December 1870. That name is not in Manet's address book, so scholars think Charlet was a comrade in the National Guard.

Legacy

No title survives from Manet himself, and the painting has gone by many names in French, German and English. The last catalogue raisonné called it Effet de neige à Petit-Montrouge, the title the museum uses. It does not appear in Manet's sales records, so he may have given it to Charlet, though the catalogue's authors suggest it went to the journalist Pierre Giffard, who sold it to the dealer Durand-Ruel in 1905. In October 1912 the Welsh collector Gwendoline Davies acquired it, and on her death it was bequeathed to what is now the National Museum Cardiff.