Notre-Dame sous la neige

Albert Marquet's 1908 view of Notre-Dame under snow from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow belongs to the rich tradition of French painters treating Paris's cathedral in winter conditions, a tradition that includes Monet's 1902 views of the cathedral in mist. Marquet's approach was radically different from Monet's: where Monet dissolved the cathedral in coloured atmospheric light, Marquet maintained its structural solidity even under snow, treating the white stone and snow-covered flying buttresses as a tonal challenge of great precision. The Pushkin Museum's extraordinary collection of French modernist works — assembled largely through the private collecting of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in the early twentieth century — places this canvas within one of the finest concentrations of French Post-Impressionist painting outside France. The 1908 date places this in the same year as Marquet's Pont Saint-Michel canvas, suggesting a winter of intensive Parisian observation in which snow conditions provided him with the reduced, austere palette he found generative.

Snow conditions reduce the cathedral's famous rose window and carved portals to mere suggestions within the overall pale stone mass. Marquet renders Notre-Dame's winter silhouette in close-valued cool greys with slight warm tones in the stone, against a sky that is itself pale with the diffuse light of an overcast winter day. The Seine in the foreground takes a darker, more chromatic tone that grounds the pale composition.