I've experienced winter only once in my life. I went to the US for work many years ago and landed right before the peak of a polar vortex. To this day, I don't know what that term means exactly. I can only remember feeling like I was going to die every time I was out on the streets. As a tropical girl, I'm perfectly okay looking at paintings instead.
Hiroshige published this in 1833 as part of Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a series documenting the main road connecting Edo to Kyoto. Station 16 is Kambara, a small post town on Suruga Bay, south of Fuji. Whether he ever saw it under snow is uncertain. He traveled through in summer, and the town sits at low elevation where snow this heavy would be unusual.
Seen here are travelers bent nearly horizontal against the snow. When prints like this arrived in European studios in the 1870s, painters couldn't stop looking at them. Van Gogh made oil copies of several Hiroshige prints. Monet covered his dining room walls with them.
Hendrick Avercamp was deaf and mute from birth, and he spent his entire career on one subject. The Dutch in winter. He lived in Kampen, in Overijssel, and was known locally as "the Mute from Kampen." This painting from around 1608 is packed with figures. Dozens of them spread across a frozen waterway, doing everything from racing to falling over.
Nobles with horse-drawn sleighs share the same surface as children on skates and vendors with baskets. Nobody looks more important than anyone else. The winters that made this possible were part of the Little Ice Age, a centuries-long cold period that regularly froze the Dutch waterways solid. Those conditions ended around 1850. The scenes Avercamp painted have never happened again.
Caillebotte painted this in the winter of 1878, looking straight down from a window onto the rooftops of Montmartre. He was 30. The angle is almost vertical, with no horizon line and barely any sky. Just chimney pots and slanted planes of snow resolving into something closer to a plan drawing than a landscape.
He's mostly remembered as the man who bankrolled the Impressionist movement. Wealthy and well-organized, he funded the exhibitions and bought the paintings. His collection, left to the French state when he died at 45, became the foundation of what is now in the Musée d'Orsay. This painting quietly argues he should be remembered for other reasons.
Halonen was Finnish, and he painted winter the way someone paints home. Karelia, the region that straddles what is now the Finnish-Russian border, is the mythic heart of the Kalevala. Finland's national epic was assembled from oral tradition at a time when the country was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule, its language and institutions under increasing pressure. When Finnish painters made the journey there, they were arguing that this land, this cold, this light, was specifically and stubbornly Finnish.
He had studied under Gauguin in Paris in the 1890s, which is easy to forget looking at his spare birch trees and frozen ground. The palette in his winter work is almost monochromatic. Grey-white light, dark trunks, muted sky. He completed his studio on Lake Tuusula in 1902 and barely left.
That's the gallery. Thank you for walking through.
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