Snow

This landscape, completely uninhabited and covered in thick snow, corresponds to a theme which greatly interested Courbet and other naturalist painters, from the Barbizon school, and pre-impressionists, who were affected by a series of particularly harsh winters in Europe in the 1860s. While the painting is deeply tactile, with strong white and blue brush strokes, applied with vigour, highlighting both the matter of heavy snow and the harsh reflected light, its framing appears almost photographic, with the tall pine trees in the foreground cut off at the top, and the small white meadow, on the opposite side, reaching towards the mountains in the background, moving away from, or even rejecting, by way of this restricted composition, the grandiloquence of the romantic landscape.