Kolsaas Mount, Norway

Kolsaas Mount, Norway from 1895 at the Musée d'Orsay documents one of the most unusual episodes of Monet's mature career — a winter campaign in Scandinavian conditions he had never previously encountered. He traveled to Norway in February 1895 to visit his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, Alice's son from her first marriage, who had settled near Oslo. The flat-topped mountain Kolsaas, rising above the Sandvika fjord, presented a geological profile as distinct and serial-capable as the Norman haystacks: Monet painted it from a fixed viewpoint in approximately thirteen canvases across varying winter weather conditions. His self-conscious parallel with Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series — which he knew from their mutual dealer Ambroise Vollard — was deliberate: the Norwegian campaign was partly an assertion that serial meditation on a geological form was not a southern French specialization but a universal pictorial method applicable anywhere in the world. Working in Norwegian winter conditions — temperatures well below those of even the hardest French winters — tested both his technical resources and his physical endurance.

The mountain's distinctive flat summit profile is repeated across the series in varying atmospheric conditions. This variant shows the mountain in cool winter light with snow on the upper slopes. A bold, simplified form is built up with directional strokes of blue, grey, and white. The palette is cool and controlled, appropriate to Scandinavian winter light.