ALS in French, signed "Your old Claude," six pages, 5.25 x 8.25, Giverny par Vernon Eure letterhead, February 9, 1895. Lengthy and amusing handwritten letter to his wife Alice on his stay in Norway. He begins by thanking her for her letters, "Don't worry, I'm doing wonderfully and your Jacques too," but worries about the accident of his son Jean, and Suzanne's inflammation. "Apart from that I see that everything is fine in Giverny, despite the cold, but you will soon have spring after that. Here the cold becomes extremely sharp. The minimum in Christiania is 10 below at noon and 25 to 30 at night, but in the places we traveled during these 4 to 5 days in the mountains we always had in the day between 20 and 30. It's to the great astonishment of the Norwegians to see me put up with this, and especially to see me in Norway in winter. They don't come back. Besides, if I suffer from one thing, it's more from too much heat in the houses, on the railways. We had good shoes, dressed like real Lapps and wrapped in huge bear skins." He notes that they traveled through "beautiful pine forests…where there is no village, there is now and then a chalet, it is a stopping place for horses and people. You are quite surprised to enter real salons, to be received there by civilized, amiable and gracious people, happy to offer you hospitality. What beautiful things to see there, from the top of these sheer mountains on huge lakes completely taken and covered with snow, we had in these places more than a meter and our sled slipped on it, the horse in sweat all covered in frost and ice like us. I also saw enormous waterfalls of hundred meters but completely frozen, it is extraordinary…In short, the disappointment of the finish was followed by a continual wonder." He writes that too much attention is paid to him in the newspapers and cafes: "It is a question of a banquet that painters and writers want to offer me…but I hope to cut it…I think of getting to work on Monday or Tuesday, first around here, and then in the mountains where I will live for a few days. I'm going to equip myself for that, because you have to be hermetically covered." Four of the pages are marked in red ballpoint. In fine condition. Claude Monet spent two months in Norway in the winter of 1895, painting 29 snowy scenes. He visited his step-son, Jacques Hoschede, who had married a Norwegian woman and lived in Christiania. The trip to Scandinavia gave him the opportunity to paint "the fearsome north" and experiment with lighting effects on snow-covered scenes. Hoschede took Monet to an artists' colony south of Christiania, the fjordside village of Sandvika. It was here that Monet created many landscapes of the village and Mount Kolsaas. The trip was perhaps the most physically taxing of all his many painting campaigns.
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