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"Bergson in his philosophy, Proust in his novel and Monet in his series are obsessed with the idea that neither ourselves nor objects remain the same, that they do not preserve their identities intact: every new second brings about a change which transforms their very nature," wrote René Huyghe to explain the new evaluation of the passing of time developed at the end of the nineteenth century and which had such importance for the development of the art of Monet and the Impressionist painters. Impressionism was the first modern artistic movement to be aware of how difficult it was for art to capture the changing condition of reality. Aware of this problem, Monet began to paint his series in which he repeated similar subjects under different atmospheric conditions, in order to record the changes which they underwent due to effects of light and time.
The Thaw at Vétheuil belongs to a series of seventeen oils which the artist painted at the time of the thaw on the Seine after the great freeze of the winter of 1879. The months of December 1879 and January 1880 were so cold that Paris and its surrouding areas were practically paralysed by the numerous snow falls and heavy frosts with abnormally extreme temperatures. At the small village of Vétheuil where Claude Monet was living at the time, situated about sixty kilometres north of Paris, the Seine was completely frozen over. The artist, who always showed a keen interest in the representation of the emphemeral and changing quality of water, here aimed to depict it at the moment when the ice broke up into pieces due to the rise in the air temperature, and was carried downstream by the current. Alice Hoschedé graphically explained this phenomenon in a letter to her husband who was then in Paris: "I woke up to a great crashing noise, like thunder in a storm... I went over to the window and instead of darkness we could see the white masses coming down fast. It was the thaw, the real thaw."
All the paintings in the series show Monet's preference for horizontal planes. In these canvases he used particularly wide formats to further emphasise the dominant horizontal of the compositions, only interrupted by the verticals of the shrubs and the trees and their corresponding reflection in the waters. Monet took full advantage of the impreciseness of the scene through his use of loose and rapid brushstrokes and a reduced palette in order to exaggerate the austerity of the Siberian landscape of that winter and succeeded as he had never done before in representing a winter atmosphere imbued with feelings of abandon and melancholy. The silence and quietness to be found in this series of paintings make us think of the artist's sadness following the early death of Camille, his wife.
In the catalogue raisonné of Monet's work (Wildenstein, no. 566) this painting is included among the works of 1880, and among those probably sold by Monet to Durand-Ruel in February 1881. The fact that it is signed and dated 1881 may be due to the fact that the work was signed and dated at the time it was sold, or that Monet did not paint it outdoors in front of the subject, but later in the studio.
Paloma Alarcó
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