![]() In Peter Doig’s magnetic 1994 painting “Cobourg 3 + 1 More,” snow seems to fall in the front of the canvas, forcing you to cast through it to the blurry image behind, and to serve “almost as a screen or veil of memory,” as the critic Adrian Searle noted in a 2017 lecture with Christie’s.ĭoig, raised partly in Canada, paints his snow scenes from photographs as well as memory. At the same time, paint’s qualities - density, fluidity, the ability to be layered - can make it inherently mimetic of snow, as with the ridges visible in Gallace’s brushwork. In these paintings, as in much of art, to capture the essence of something requires betraying its particulars. The artist radically used blue in the shadows in the work before long, blue shadows were commonplace, so much so that Kent could rhapsodize about “loving the blue shadows, loving the forms that cast them and the deeps of space their blue reflected.” Fifty years after Monet, Wassily Kandinsky barely used visible white at all to capture snow beneath a setting sun in his 1909 “Winter Landscape” - it’s a profusion of pink, blue, yellow, green and even black. Claude Monet painted more than 100 snow scenes his “Magpie,” which was rejected from Paris’s Salon of 1869 for being too drab, is now considered an early masterpiece. ![]() The Impressionists, living through a series of exceptionally cold winters, trained their eyes on the interplay between snow, light and color, studying every variety of reflection, glare and shadow. In changing how they painted snow, artists changed how we perceive it. Artworks such as these, it turns out, may provide the most complete cultural record of how humans have lived with, and in, snow. In Japan, snow was both subject and symbol in woodblock prints, where the washi paper was sometimes left bare to create a field of white. Persian and Indian painters weren’t doing observational landscape painting at the time, but Navina Najat Haidar, the curator in charge of Islamic Art at the Met, points to snow in several 15th-century illustrations for the epic Persian poem “The Shahnama” (circa 977-1010 C.E.) by Ferdowsi, including one in which a sorcerer conjures a storm to engulf an Iranian army. Most of the early examples are, not surprisingly, from Northern Europe, among them Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s landmark “The Hunters in the Snow,” from 1565. ![]() The best-known of these, “February,” from circa 1412-1416 and usually attributed to the more rustic of the Dutch Limbourg brothers, Paul, is exquisite: the snow resting on the sheep pen, the dovecote, the beehives. Always traced with ephemerality - the snow likely melted before the rendering was done - paintings of snow now record a double evanescence.Īrtists have made snow a subject since at least the 15th century, when winter scenes began appearing in illuminated books of hours. ![]() In Hokkaido, Japan, snow had been imported by truck. In northern Europe snow festivals had been canceled. I knew it would, but I also knew that, here and elsewhere, it will snow less. My daughter had asked that morning if it would ever snow again. Stumbling on Kent’s painting felt like unearthing a picture of a lost loved one: the recognition, the elation, the grief. The winter of 2019 would prove to be one of the warmest on record, during which only 4.8 inches of snow would fall. In the dimly lit room (its dimness exacerbated by the over-bright sun outside) the whole painting seemed to glow. But it was the snow, along with the blue shadows graphed over it, that gripped me. Not just snow: “The Trapper” (1921) by Rockwell Kent also depicts a lone man a dog mountains, clouds, and sky a pale half-moon. Last winter, on a day that would reach 66 degrees by noon, I saw, on the wall of the Whitney Museum, a painting of snow.
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