Oat Field with Poppies

Champ d'avoine aux coquelicots, or Oat Field with Poppies, is a summer landscape Claude Monet painted around 1890 in the fields near his home at Giverny. A broad field of oats, gone gold and rose with ripeness and flecked with red poppies, runs across the lower half of the canvas. A dark tree and a clump of blue-gray woods stand at the back under a pale, heat-hazed sky. The painting has belonged to the city of Strasbourg since 1948 and hangs in its Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain (MAMCS).

What you're looking at

The picture is simple: a field, a group of trees, a sky. The field takes up the bottom half and is painted in a dense weave of short strokes in ocher, salmon, pink and dull green, the colors of oats in full sun. Poppies are scattered through it as hundreds of small dabs of vermilion. They are thickest in the foreground and thin out and shrink toward the back, which gives the field its depth. There are no figures or paths, and nothing to measure scale by except the size of the red touches.

On the right, a large tree in dark green, almost black in places, rises past the top edge, with a few lighter, sunlit branches reaching out to the left. In the middle distance a low mass of trees is painted in cool blues, lilacs and pinks, softened by haze. To its left, a thin line of blue marks the far horizon. The sky above is an even, milky surface of cream, pale pink and gray-blue, brushed over a textured ground. It feels like a hot, still afternoon in July.

Look at the lower left corner and the signature is almost swallowed by the poppies, a sign of how fully Monet wanted the field to fill the canvas.

Giverny fields, summer 1890

By 1890 Monet had lived at Giverny for seven years, and that autumn he bought the house he had been renting. The countryside around the village, with its meadows, poplar-lined river and cultivated fields, had become his main subject. In the summer of 1890 he painted a small group of oat and poppy fields, before turning in late summer and autumn to the grainstacks that became his first full series; see the Haystacks series. The fields and the stacks are part of the same farmland near his house.

Compare this canvas with earlier poppy pictures such as Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny (1885) and with the Poppy Field in the Hermitage, and with the much earlier Poppies at Argenteuil of 1873. There, poppies are a colorful setting for a mother and child; here they are the whole subject. Giverny and its surroundings are covered on Giverny: Monet's House and Garden.

How it was painted

By 1890 Monet's touch had grown denser and more even across the canvas, and this picture shows it. Instead of the broad, separate strokes of the 1870s, the field is covered in a fine, layered mesh of small marks, which gives the surface a woven texture and the color a vibrating quality. The sky is laid over a thick ground so that the earlier layers catch the light. Monet uses complementary pairs throughout: red poppies against green stalks, orange field against blue woods.

The composition is pared down. A single dark mass on the right balances a wide open area on the left, and the horizon sits exactly at mid-height. That simplicity, a few large shapes under changing light, is the method he would push to its limit in the grainstacks a few months later.

Where to see it

The painting was acquired by the Strasbourg museums in 1948 and is now in the Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain on the Ill river. It is one of the few Monet canvases in eastern France. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.