Sandvika, Norway

Sandvika, Norway from 1895 at the Art Institute of Chicago was painted during Monet's February–April 1895 Norwegian winter campaign, when he encountered a landscape entirely unlike anything he had painted before: deep snow, dark conifer forests, the distinctive blue-grey winter light of Scandinavia, and temperatures far below the coldest French winters he had known. The village of Sandvika, near Oslo on the Sandvika River, provided him with the same combination of settled human presence and surrounding nature that he had found at Vétheuil and Giverny, but translated into an entirely different climatic and light register. The Norway campaign was the most geographically extreme excursion of his career and produced approximately thirty canvases in six weeks — a productive rate that indicates both the inspiration the unfamiliar landscape provided and the serial momentum he brought to every new campaign by this period of his career. The Art Institute's Sandvika canvas, within its comprehensive Monet collection, allows visitors to measure how dramatically his palette and compositional approach shifted when confronted with this Nordic winter world rather than his familiar Norman landscapes.

The Norwegian winter light creates a blue-grey tonal field quite unlike the warm French winter light of the Grainstacks snow variants. Monet renders the snow with blue and violet shadows, the pine trees in dark cool greens, and the sky in pale greys and whites. The composition is often vertical, accommodating the tall pines that dominate the snowy landscape.