“At 5 in the morning I was woken up by a frightful noise like the rumbling of thunder…on top of this noise came cries from Lavacourt; very quickly I was at the windows and despite considerable obscurity saw white masses hurling about. This time it was the débâcle, the real thing.”
On January 4th 1880, Monet and his family awoke to the thunderous sound of ice floes breaking loose and crashing down the river Seine. One of Europe’s coldest seasons on record, the winter of 1879–80 witnessed abnormally low temperatures that caused the Seine to freeze over. As the ice eventually thawed, trees, bridges and even houses were ripped from where they stood and carried away with the water. Despite the devastation it caused in local communities, the drama of this meteorological event proved transformative for the artist who soon embarked upon a series of depictions of the Seine under these conditions. The shifting movement of ice across the water’s surface served as the primary focus of these composition (see fig. 1). The resulting paintings, including the present work, are some of Monet’s most impressive renderings of the natural world. Capturing his subject in a state of flux, these works mark a defining moment in the artist’s œuvre.
“Here we had a terrible débâcle and of course I tried to make something of it.”
At the time Monet was living at Vétheuil, a small village situated beside the Seine to the north of Paris. After the recent death of his wife Camille, Monet was experiencing a period of intense hardship, marked by grief and financial instability. The sudden drop in temperature only served to exacerbate these feelings; communications were halted during the cold weather and the price of food rose significantly as it became harder to transport commodities in the snow: “The Journal de Mantes of 10 December, reporting on this event, noted that the ‘pitiless winter’ was much worse than anything seen in previous years. Enormous blocks of ice floated down the Seine [see fig. 2]. Then the temperature fell to -25 degrees and the Seine froze over completely” (Daniel Wildenstein, Monet or The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 2003, p. 150).
Despite these bitter conditions, Monet found great inspiration in the frigid landscape that surrounded him. Winter and snow played an important role in Impressionism (see fig. 3), as art historian Charles S. Moffett has observed: “Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte, Gauguin, and others focused on the very particular character of the air, the light, and the appearance of color in landscapes that were blanketed with white. Their snowscapes represent the first sustained interest in the subject since that of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. With a few notable exceptions, however, most of these earlier paintings are not about the defining characteristics of the snowscape but rather about a wide range of human activities in the context of a landscape covered with snow. The Impressionists, on the other hand, were drawn to the subject because of its unique visual characteristics. The subtleties of light and color offered an opportunity to work in a range of often muted color that brings to mind Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ in particular colors or combinations of color. The Impressionists concentrated not on ideas about the thing but the thing itself” (C. Moffett in Impressionists in Winter, Effets de neige (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Art, London et al., 1998-99, pp. 15-16).
In La Seine à Lavacourt, débâcle the sky is brought to life with frenetic, Impressionistic brushstrokes that perfectly capture the harsh weather. In contrast, the clouds are shot through with light and executed in colors that exude an atmosphere of calm, in contrast to the drama engulfing the landscape. The town of Lavacourt sits sleepily amidst the ice. The high water levels have completely obscured the îles de Moisson. It is the natural, as opposed to the human, world that seizes and holds the artist’s interest.
Although the freezing weather, followed by the catastrophic break up of ice had wrought havoc among the communities along the banks of the Seine, the débâcle provided Monet with exactly the visual characteristics Moffett discusses. Eager to capture the ephemeral appearance of water in the light refracting from the ice, Monet braved exceptionally harsh weather conditions, as outlined by art historian David Joel: “To record the débâcle he crossed by boat to Lavacourt, pushing the ice floes aside to get there…He dressed to maintain body warmth and kept his hands warm by keeping small hot bottles in his pockets” (D. Joel, Monet at Vétheuil and on the Norman Coast 1878-1883, Woodbridge, 2002, p. 93). The thawing of the ice provided the artist with the perfect subject matter: “This dramatic landscape, born out of violence, with its watery beauty and exquisite gray-blue tonality, was irresistible to Monet. He hired a carriage to view the scene with his family, and over the subsequent days he went out on his own and painted more than a dozen canvases of the transformed river. Painted from a variety of points of view, these paintings constituted one of his most successful, fully articulated series to date” (Tanya Paul in Monet and the Seine Impressions of a river (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, 2014, p. 102).
Capturing the delicate interplay of light across the frozen water, La Seine à Lavacourt, débâcle is a beautifully elegiac composition imbued with a sense of renewal. Cool blues delineating the broken ice floes are offset by pastel oranges and pinks that inspire a feeling of hope. The water mirrors the warm light in the sky and feathered brushstrokes illustrating clouds are echoed in the ice below. The scattered remnants of ice drifting downstream mark an end to the bleak winter; for Monet they would provide another form of salvation, as these evocative portrayals of the icy Seine helped to restore his financial situation. The débâcle works also mark an important moment in Monet’s career as they illustrate the artist’s early fascination with capturing repeated motifs beneath differing light and weather conditions. Several art historians have remarked upon the similarities between the dynamic rendering of the ice floes in this early foray into painting series, and Monet’s later famed Nymphéas (see fig. 10): “It is furthermore fascinating, as Charles Stuckey pointed out, to compare the ice floes and the water lilies that Monet started to paint nearly twenty years later, and which determined most of his late works. The animated surface of the water as well as the play of reflection and reality can already be found here” (Helga Kessler Auisch in ibid., 2014, p. 104). La Seine à Lavacourt, débâcle is an important painting in this series, recorded by Monet from the bank by his house with Lavacourt shown on the right. Monet produced several canvases presenting this same viewpoint, one of which is in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the other in the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille (figs. 9 & 10). Though painted in 1880 as confirmed by the weather conditions and Wildenstein's catalouge raisonné, a number of canvases like the present bear the a subsequent date near the artist's signature. On occasion, Monet was known to sign and date his works at the time of sale, often years after they were painted.
La Seine à Lavacourt, débâcle has an impressive provenance, having been in the collection of Catholina Lambert, a prominent silk manufacturer whose castle in New Jersey housed an impressive collection of European and American paintings and sculpture. The work was subsequently purchased by George Washington Vanderbilt III and would remain in the ownership of the prominent Vanderbilt family for a century.