Soleil couchant sur la Seine à Lavacourt, effet d’hiver

A low orange sun burns through the cold grey-blue air above the Seine, its light and its long reflection across the ice-veined water the warmest colours in a winter landscape where the village of Lavacourt is barely sketched on the far bank. Claude Monet painted this view through the late winter of 1880, from Vétheuil on the opposite shore where he had settled in 1878, and the river thaw that winter became the subject of some twenty canvases; the freezing mist is handled in fluid strokes while the water and riverbanks are built up in thick, steady paint, and the intense disc of colour at the centre deliberately recalls his 1872 Impression, soleil levant, whose title gave the Impressionist movement its name. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.