Possessing that precious ability to stop all of us in our tracks

AND then came the snow. Saturday night was still and windless. It was then the snow came, dry and persistent, layer on layer, covering and outlining and transforming everything in crisp perfect whiteness.

Paul Valery wrote the definitive description:

Oh, how many snowflakes, during my sweet absence,

Must the dark skies have given up during the course of the night.

This pure desert that fell soundlessly from the darkness

Has blanketed the features of the beguiling earth

Beneath this ample whiteness so secretly accumulated

And melds it into a faceless, voiceless place,

Where the eye, disoriented, is drawn to rooftops

Hiding their treasure of ordinary life

Barely offering the promise of a wisp of smoke.

Close to a century later, the words applied, unchanged, yesterday morning.

Dawn came without birdsong, every path’s smooth carpet untouched, except for the tiny footprint trails left by the cats, every overturned bucket and abandoned garden tool given an artistic significance by the clinging flakes.

The opening door offered unexpected whispered resistance and — pushed — shaped an open fan in the white underfoot. Up close, the snow was not a soft totality, but made up of a million tiny crisp balls that crunched underfoot, making a record of every footprint in hard shining compacted snow ice. The flakes were more like sleet, but without the subversive wet that sleet brings with it. They had piled in corners, sheltered into mounds.

The fish pond was an inch thick in ice, shot-blasted on the top with frozen snow. It took half an hour to punch enough holes in it for the fish to breathe and by that time, nobody cared enough to check if any of them were still alive. Everything had frozen, so the water barrel, had a perfect circle of crusty ice locking it down.

“Much of the country is covered in snow, this morning,” Gavin Jennings told us on the early radio news bulletins, sounding serious and urgent and describing what had happened, overnight, as “the bad weather”. The temperature gauges on main roads came into play, quoted as indicating record cold on some of the motorways.

By then the sun was coming up, bright but not warm, reconfiguring the softened outlines of the land with sharp-angled light and shadow. You could see why the Impressionists had been so in love with what they called Effets de Neige. There can be no challenge quite as intriguing as finding painterly ways to define the contrasts so that white paint stands out against the white of the canvas, which may explain why snow scenes were relatively rare in European painting for many previous centuries.

When 14th and 15th century artists painted pictures of snowy landscapes, they tended to focus, not on the snow per se, but on a range of human activities made more interesting to the artist because of the fact that they happened within a snowscape. Even then, it’s the exceptions that stick in the mind, like Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow, one of the most popular paintings in the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna, which has an odd effect on visitors, who tend to first glance at it, briefly wander on, and then come back, drawn by illusion of silence delivered by the painting: the birds flying high against the overcast sky, the purposeful energy of the hunters and their hounds, the tiny dark human figures skating in the background.

Another exception is the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours, illustrated by the Limbourg brothers in the early 15th century, where the visual of the month of February causes an indrawn breath of dismay followed by laughter from modern viewers. They take in the outdoor scene with the snow-capped beehives, the woodcutter in mid-chop, the crows harvesting leftover seeds, and it’s all very stylised and Christmas cardy. Then their eye is drawn to the interior scene, with two peasants seated side by side, warming themselves at an unseen fire, their clothes yanked up to reveal a complete absence of underwear. The gentrified lady beside them, her own bright blue skirt pulled up, more decorously, only to mid-shin, turns her face away from the two flashers, her eyes modestly lowered.

Those exceptions aside, it wasn’t until the 19th century that snow began to frequently figure in European paintings. Two factors came together to make Effets de Neige so singularly appealing to the Impressionists.

The first was the opening up of Japan’s ports following two centuries of relative isolation, which had allowed Japan to become an exporting nation. As a result, a flood of Japanese art had reached Europe, influencing young artists so much that that the collective slang term for one group of them, prior to the day when they were dubbed The Impressionists, was The Japanese.

Japanese prints were on the walls of writers like Emile Zola, who sat for a Manet portrait in front of a Japanese screen and a print of a Japanese wrestler. But it was the elegance of the portrayals of snow in those prints which proved particularly intriguing to the young French artists at the time, particularly Monet. His estate, after his death, revealed that he had owned more than two hundred Japanese wood cut prints, many of them scenes of Japanese, huddled inside their billowing outer clothes, making their way through snowy landscapes. One or two of them quite clearly inspired a couple of Monet’s winter paintings.

The second factor influencing painters to take such an interest in snow in the late 19th century was the weather. Two lengthy spells of untypically brutally cold winters happened in France in the latter half of the 19th century. It wasn’t just that the Seine froze over or that substantial ice floes could be seen and heard colliding with each other in the river after the thaw.

It was that the snow came earlier in greater volume and lasted longer, so that painters who had never seen quite so much of it had the chance to study it and experiment with ways to render it on canvas. Monet’s study of a farm gate with a magpie atop it surveying the surrounding snow banks is still the most popular painting in the Musee d’Orsay, measured by sales of postcards.

But you don’t have to be a painter to be arrested by snow. It stops all of us in our tracks and plays hell with our priorities, so a monitor screen becomes less attractive than taking a couple of tea trays to the hill behind the old church for make-shift tobogganing. The prospect of being snowed in and perhaps unable to get to work becomes, not a threat, but a benign promise.

This weekend, in decades to come, will be remembered as particularly special by today’s kids. Unlike adults, those kids didn’t see the snow defined in negative AA Roadwatch terms. Nor will they remember it as having taken place in the winter of our discontent or at the time of the new austerity.

That’s because children focus on what’s precious and rare. The rest of us might usefully learn from them, rather than continue our obsession with lost hopes and future constraints.