a quiet season

winter paintings that bring me peace

Winter is my favorite season, with December being my favorite month. And it’s the season I love to see the most in paintings. Winter paintings carry a certain quiet, a sense of serenity that can sometimes feel a bit empty. This aligns with the stillness and melancholy of winter and the end of the year. This is why winter landscapes are so perfect to look at during December and are, perhaps, the most seasonal paintings out of all four seasons.

Here is an examination of winter through paintings that I love, which capture this characteristic calm of winter really well.

Snow Scene at Argenteuil by Claude Monet

Monet created this landscape painting during the winter of 1874–1875. It’s inspired by the town of Argenteuil, where he and his family lived from 1871 to 1878. The snow was the first thing I noticed when I first saw this painting. It looks so light and fresh—it resembles cotton candy in a way. This is the kind of winter that I like to imagine, the one that is soft and serene. Monet’s rough brushstrokes on the lower half of the painting accentuates this feeling—the texture comes off quite familiar. They evoke the image of footsteps in the snow, or the misty air of early morning. Monet’s impressionist focus on capturing the effects of natural light on snow also gives off a similar feeling, with the light blue skies and cool blue-violent shadows typical of early daylight.

I love this painting because it feels simultaneously objective and subjective. We’re looking at this scene from an outsider’s point-of-view, but at the same time, it feels like something we’re experiencing. We can’t see the people in the center of the painting clearly; their backs are to us and their faces are blurry. Still, we can imagine their feet sinking into the snow as they walk—made particularly easier by Monet’s rough brushstrokes—as well as their expressions and relationship from their linked arms and relaxed positions. Although we look upon a place we’ve likely never been before and people we can’t exactly see, we experience it all the same. If anything, the blurred faces makes it easier for us to inject our own experiences and feelings into this scene. These were my thoughts when I first saw this painting in the National Gallery: the painting feels more personal and special the longer I look at it.

I also love how small the people are depicted as opposed to the background, which takes up the majority of the canvas’s space. But, because the more-largely depicted couple is almost exactly placed at the center of the painting, the viewer’s eyes are drawn to them first. As we insert ourselves into the painting, this has the overall effect of making us feel small in the presence of nature. This is another way this painting perfectly demonstrates the feeling of winter and of the end of the year, as I rewind and think back upon the past months—and maybe learn to take the present a little less seriously.

Snow Storm On The Avenue by Guy Carleton Wiggins

This painting gives off a similarly serene impression as the previous one. They’re also similar in that they’re both essentially landscape paintings. People are portrayed as impossibly small in the backdrop of nature. In this painting, the buildings are almost exaggeratedly large—they tower over the people. I loved this when I first saw the painting, as it makes the landscape feel more spacious and less claustrophobic. Additionally, the diminutiveness of the people has a similar effect in this painting as in Monet’s. It allows the painting to feel more objective and makes the viewer feel small in the face of bigger things.

But this painting is different from the previous one in that it illustrates a snow storm, while the previous one depicts stationary snow. It definitely makes the painting feel more dynamic—like a snapshot of a fleeting moment in the everyday life of the townspeople. This spontaneity and sense of movement is something I love to see in all artworks.

Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich

This isn’t Friedrich’s most well-known piece, but it’s my personal favorite. Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape artist. Like other Romanticists, his works are characterized by a sense of the ‘sublime’—in this winter landscape, it’s demonstrated by the disproportion between the minuscule human figure and vast, indifferent nature. You can barely see the crippled traveler leaning against the boulder with his crutches abandoned in the snow. Humans are not the focus of this painting: in every sense, this painting is a landscape, a portrayal of nature.

Still, the painting feels very human—like an externalization of human emotions and thoughts—which is exactly what Friedrich intended. Like his contemporary Romanticists, while he did specialize in painting landscapes, he did not want to portray them in an objective, ‘factual’ way. He wanted “to reflect the artist’s soul and emotions in the landscape,” as he once said. Friedrich attempts to do this in this painting as well. The landscape is foggy: the fog obscures details (like of the distant Gothic church, which is portrayed only as a silhouette), but, together with the snow-covered plain, it creates a sense of emptiness and solemnity. This shows Friedrich’s focus on creating a certain charged atmosphere rather than painting accurately.

The evocative mood of this painting isn’t the only reason why it’s one of my favorites. It’s also—as I see it—the perfect encapsulation of winter in general, December specifically. If fall was the season where we start to shred off pieces of ourselves and undergo changes (as I’ve talked about in my autumn literature & art guide) winter is the season after we have already changed and have been left bare. It’s a time for reflection as well as hope for growth, maybe for better days. In Friedrich’s winter landscape, although the scene is quite austere and bleak, there’s signs of spring: in the blades of grass breaking through the snow cape, evergreen trees, and the slow dawn washing over the mist.