L'Hiver

One of the most populous scenes in this exhibition, L’Hiver depicts a frozen body of water teeming with skating pedestrians, most of whom are performing some type of labor. The couple in the center, for instance, pulls a large cart of hay across the ice, perhaps to the rowboat waiting at the far bottom left of the page. The flamboyant physicality of subjects on the periphery (such as the two figures on the right, skating with their feet in the air) suffuse the scene with gaiety, thus blurring the line between work and play. The landscape is at once productive and utopic. Rather than pose a hazard, the winter season serves—even uplifts—the village’s pedestrians and workers.