Rachel Cohen

Snow this morning.

This painting – Rabbit Warren at Pontoise, Snow by Camille Pissarro, 1879 – is a regular point of reference for me, one I visit fairly often at the Art Institute. I had thought that writing of it would wait until next year. (Will we be inside again? There are questions and predictions about future waves of the disease. Hard to grasp what the year will be.)

Most winters I write a little about snow and painting because snow is painting in nature.

Pissarro was a great snow painter. He painted nearly a hundred paintings in which snow was a central theme. This winter, of 1879, was an especially severe one in France, and there are many great snow paintings from that year.

The snow over the rabbit warrens gives this a hummocky shape.

One of the difficulties with painting layered white is that you get too much opacity and a painting loses its depth. Besides the quality of actual snow is not of airlessness. There have to be other colors layered in to get the feeling of the snow.

I remembered – walking out this morning to fill the bird feeder, to see how the daffodils were managing bent under their burdens – that to enter a landscape of snow seems almost like entering paint.

Some paintings are seasonal. To feel the air in them out of season is like trying to pack for a trip to a different climate, you can’t really guess with your body how it would feel.

The snow is already melting here as I write this. And I notice this odd bright green that Pissarro used. Perhaps the painting too is of snow early or late, stretched beyond its season.