The Banks of the Marne in Winter (1866): Artwork and History

The Banks of the Marne in Winter (1866) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This painting of a rural winter landscape is resolutely un-picturesque. Its dark color palette is uninterrupted by any majestic natural elements, such as towering trees or a glittering pond. Even early in his career, Camille Pissarro subverted traditional landscape painting by deliberately diverging from the pastoral scenes of his mentor, Camille Corot. In this large, rectangular canvas, Pisarro applied paint heavily, often using a palette knife, in emulation of Gustave Courbet, whose work is on view nearby. Just a few years after he made this work, Pissarro adopted a more immediate approach to landscape painting, working en plein air (outdoors) directly from nature rather than in a studio, a technique closely associated with the Impressionists.

Object facts

• Title: The Banks of the Marne in Winter
• Date: 1866
• Artist attribution: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 91.8 × 150.2 cm (36 1/8 × 59 1/8 in.); Framed: 119.7 × 178.5 × 10.2 cm (47 1/8 × 70 1/4 × 4 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1957.306

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.