The Banks of the Marne in Winter

The Banks of the Marne in Winter — Camille Pissarro. 1866.

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.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

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.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.