Claude Monet 'Sandvika, Norway' Poster – 1895 Impressionist Winter Scene

Sandvika, Norway (1895) belongs to the small group of paintings Claude Monet produced during a two-month winter campaign in Norway, one of the least familiar episodes in his working life. Monet was fifty-four, internationally established, and had not travelled abroad to paint in some years. The trip was instigated by a combination of factors: his Norwegian acquaintance Fritz Thaulow had been encouraging him to visit, his stepson Jacques Hoschedé had moved to Christiania — now Oslo — the year before, and Norwegian literature and music were briefly fashionable in 1890s Paris.

Monet arrived in late January 1895 and spent much of his stay in or near Sandvika, a village ten miles west of Christiania. The Norwegian winter proved more demanding than he had anticipated. Letters home to his wife Alice describe the difficulty of finding suitable motifs in deep snow, the cold limiting how long he could work outdoors, and the practical problems of painting at sub-zero temperatures. He produced twenty-nine canvases in roughly two months, including at least six views of Sandvika.

The Sandvika compositions all feature the village's iron footbridge, which Monet specifically said reminded him of the wooden Japanese bridge he was then building in his garden at Giverny. The Norway pictures sit between two of his major series — the Rouen Cathedral paintings of 1892 to 1894 and the early Water Lilies of the late 1890s — and they prefigure his lifelong preoccupation with reflection, atmosphere, and the play of light on still water.

Monet kept most of the Norwegian canvases himself. Aside from a small number sold to the dealer Durand-Ruel, the majority remained in his possession until his death in 1926.

Poster design Copyright © 2025 Art Poster Archive. All Rights Reserved.