December 2009

In the Bleak Midwinter: Artists' Responses to Snow

Ann Clements gave a special Christmas lecture to the Farnham Decorative and Fine Arts Society at the Farnham Maltings on 15 December. Her presentation ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ described the responses of western artists to snow and winter over the last five centuries.

One of the earliest representations of snow dates from the middle of the fifteenth century: the illuminated Book of Hours – a prayer book – of the Duc de Berry shows, in its section for February, a prosperous farmstead in winter. By the 1560’s, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was painting winter landscapes such as the ‘Hunters in the Snow’ series. These were scenes of secular activity, devoid of all religious significance; by setting the scene in winter Bruegel was able to use the pale background to pull his composition together. Dutch artists continued to develop the topic of winter paintings, and by the mid-seventeenth century, highly naturalistic works were being produced. They travelled abroad, too, and Abraham Hondius was painting scenes of the frozen Thames in the 1680’s. One of the most familiar British winter paintings is Sir Henry Raeburn’s ‘The Skating Minister’ of 1792-4, in which a sombrely black-clad cleric is depicted against a light background, gliding in dignified pose with one leg held out behind him – apparently a recognised style of skating in its time. A few years later, in about 1811, the Romantic German artist Caspar David Friedrich was painting his ‘Winter Landscape’ in which a bleak representation of boulders and fir trees is invested with religious symbolism.

In December 1869, Luke Fildes provided an illustration ‘Houseless and Hungry’ to the “Graphic” magazine, showing a line of homeless people applying for an overnight stay in the workhouse to escape the winter night. Apart from its interest as an example of social realism, Fildes’ work was seen by van Gogh during his stay in London, and had a profound effect upon him. In northern France, he painted the wives of miners carrying sacks of coal; ‘not a pretty snowscene’, as he wrote to his brother, but an anonymous and brutalised winter landscape.

The French impressionists delighted in snow, and Monet wrote that he preferred winter to summer as a subject. His portrayal of his wife, Camille, in ‘Le Papillon Rouge’ is seen through the window of a drab room; Camille, outside and wearing a red shawl, is set against a crisp winter landscape, so symbolising the warmth she brought him. In 1871, Monet and Pissarro took refuge in London from war in France; while Pissarro seldom left his temporary home of Upper Norwood in his painting, Monet relished the fogs of a London winter, and absorbed some of the influence of Turner. Renoir was initially unenthusiastic about snow, calling it ‘a blight on the face of nature’, but eventually realised the potential of a snowy landscape as a blank canvas for his subject. Gauguin, painting in Brittany in 1888, ignored perspective in his wintry landscape, and showed the flatness of the canvas.

Ann Clements concluded her lecture with Laura Knight’s naturalistic watercolour of 1909, ‘Cheyne Walk, Chelsea’: a London scene in the slush, and a fine conclusion to ‘five hundred years of artistic shivering’.

Copy by Margaret Thomas