The Challenges of the Artist in Winter

Artists have long suffered for their art. From illness and poverty to grief, addiction, and existential doubt, many of history’s greatest painters endured hardship in their pursuit of excellence. And for some, that struggle extended beyond the studio and into unforgiving climates to capture landscapes that they believed were worth the risk.

As temperatures dip over winter, we’re reminded of the bracing impact of the winter weather, as we head indoors for the comfort of a warm fire. Yet for some artists, the same chill that sends a shiver down our spine calls them to pitch an easel and a canvas, even if it could prove to be a deadly decision.

The English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley said, “perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?” And what greater inclemency than the biting winter cold.

Winter reshapes the world around us, and as the environment changes, so too do the color choices, themes, and subjects of artists. And for some, winter leaves its mark in more ways than one.

Monet’s Beard of Icy Stalactites

“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration,” explained Claude Monet of his approach to painting. The father of Impressionism revolutionized art with his approach to painting ‘en plein air’, or outdoors, which would influence the trajectory of Impressionism and modern art as a whole.

Allowing him to engage with his natural surroundings, Monet’s decision to paint in the sun and snow was a bold act that challenged the conventions of academic painting, and allowed him to capture the changing light, color, and atmosphere. Monet painted hundreds of paintings surrounded by nature, and an estimated 100 paintings related to snow, but this came at a personal cost.

“It was cold enough to split rocks,” wrote a journalist after encountering Monet painting in winter. “We perceived a foot warmer, then an easel, then a gentleman bundled up, in three overcoats, gloves on his hands, his face half frozen; it was Monet studying an effect of snow.”

Found under a blanket of snow, Monet was said to head out in sub-zero temperatures and wrap himself in three coats with a hot water bottle at his feet to counter the biting cold. Using recently invented readymade oil paint in portable metal tubes, Monet ventured into the bitter winter in Argenteuil in 1874/75. Despite heavy snow, Monet produced no fewer than 18 paintings of the winter weather that year, including Snow at Argenteuil (1875).

Seemingly unconcerned by the freezing temperatures, Monet swapped the relatively mild winters of Giverny for a snow-covered expedition to Bjornegaard and Sandvika, Norway to paint the Scandinavian countryside. Armed with a shovel to cut paths in the snow, Monet used the color blue to help convey the deep cold and the shadows of the snow as he braved average daily temperatures of -13°F.

In a letter to his friend Gustave Geffroy, Monet said, “I painted part of the day today, while it was snowing continually: you would have laughed to see me entirely white, my beard covered in icy stalactites.”

Cezanne and the Chill that Precipitated his Fatal Illness

Described as “the father of us all” by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne was a relentless pursuer of new modes of representation, who influenced avant-garde movements in the early 20th century and established a bridge between Impressionism and early Cubism. But his artistic endeavor would ultimately be his downfall after he was caught in a storm while working in a field on 15 October 1906, which ultimately led to his death from pneumonia a week later at the age of 67.

Cezanne had painted Mont Sainte-Victoire in the summer months and decided to depict it set against a wintery backdrop. But, after working for two hours, Cezanne collapsed on the way home and lost consciousness due to hypothermia and later contracted severe pneumonia. Carried home on the back of a laundry cart, Cezanne’s housekeeper is said to have revived him by rubbing his arms and legs to increase circulation, and he regained consciousness. Ever the worker, Cezanne awoke the next day and set to work on his last painting, Portrait of the Gardener Vallier (1906), but later that day he fainted. He was put to bed and never left. He died of pneumonia on 22 October 1906 and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.

Painting outside wasn’t anything new for Cezanne. In fact, in January 1906, Cezanne was photographed painting outdoors by the Nabis artist Ker-Xavier Roussel. In opposition to his customary straw hat, Cezanne instead wore his warm felted-wool chapeau melon and was captured bracing against the cold in his ancient black wool coat.

“Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world,” said Cezanne. “I feel colored by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos.”

Van Gogh’s Muted Winter Surprise

As Vincent van Gogh stepped off the train in Arles from Paris in February 1888, he was greeted by a record cold spell in southern France and was faced with the unexpected prospect of adapting his palette to suit a snowy landscape, resulting in Landscape with Snow (1888).

Using a varied palette to express the slow melting of the snow over the French landscape, van Gogh channeled Monet’s use of blue to convey the crisp nature of the cold weather across the sky and in his Impressionist stripes across the footpath, which can be seen in person at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Emphasizing the features of the landscape with dashes of red, green, yellow, brown, and black, van Gogh’s palette is quite varied considering the snowy scene that sits before him, but in contrast to the feverish colors of the summer harvest paintings Van Gogh made later in the year, it has a remarkable restraint.

Russell W. Porter’s Arctic Struggle

An artist, engineer, architect, and cartographer, Russell W. Porter was a polymath who was also known as a pioneer of cutaway drawing and is sometimes referred to as the founder of amateur telescope making.

Not to be pigeon-holed, he was also an avid Arctic explorer who endured frostbite, snow blindness, low light, and frozen watercolors in his pursuit to reach the North Pole and capture its beauty on canvas. Porter made six trips to the Arctic Circle between 1894 and 1903, during which he sketched his fellow explorers, local people, and recorded daily life in camp; all in subzero temperatures. He joined the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition of 1901 and while sketching, faced a polar bear, but the -35°F temperature congealed the oil in his gun as the bear drew nearer to camp, before finally going off and killing the bear.

Two years later, Porter joined an expedition as assistant scientist and artist in May 1903, but in November, packed ice crushed the ship, leaving the crew alone for two winters on frozen land in temperatures as low as -62°F. Facing an uncertain future, isolation, months without sunlight, food rationing, and crippling temperatures, the crew endured more than two years adrift from the rest of the world, before being rescued in July 1905.

Despite the conditions, Porter produced an impressive number of sketches and watercolors. As temperatures plunged below 30 degrees, Porter was at times unable to even hold a pencil. Frostbite was an ever-present danger, but despite the obvious peril, Porter said the hardest thing for him was watching the Aurora Borealis “knowing I was absolutely helpless and unable to paint it.”

He tried to paint by candlelight, but the yellow light distorted all the colors, so he described the natural beauty of the aurora borealis in his notes, which today can be seen in the National Archives Collection of Donated Materials. “Starting with a deep orange at the horizon and blending perfectly with each other came Cadmium, chrome yellow, and then a beautiful, delicate pale green. Following this color came cobalt blue, intensifying to a veritable Prussian blue, so dark the stars could be seen twinkling against it.”

Nasser Azam Specially Adapted Brushes 

Like Porter, the British contemporary artist, Nasser Azam faced sub-zero temperatures in his quest to produce a series of large-scale outdoor paintings inspired by the Antarctic continent. Unlike Porter though, he devised an ingenious solution to combat the challenges of the fearsome weather.

Battling winds as high as 100kph and temperatures of -30˚C, with a wind chill of -45˚C in the Antarctic tundra, Azam completed a series of 13 large-scale paintings in February 2010, which he exhibited the following year as Art Below, as part of a dual public art display in the Tokyo Metro and London Underground.

To prepare for the nine-day expedition that saw Azam create larger-scale canvases on an ice desert, ice lake, ice cave, and a glacier, he devised brushes that worked in the freezing temperatures and acrylic paint that wouldn’t clog, which he tested in the freezers at Billingsgate Fish Market, London.

Despite the rigorous preparation, four of Azam’s canvases were lost in an Antarctic gale, before one was retrieved two days later. “It was impossible to prepare completely for this project, and I couldn’t have predicted how tough the conditions were going to be,” said Azam. “But I was able to complete most of the paintings as planned, and hope that they convey at least some of the amazing beauty of Antarctica.”