Summer (Meadow at Bezons)

Claude Monet's Summer, catalogued as Meadow at Bezons and sometimes called Fields of Bezons, was painted in 1874 in the open countryside at Bezons, across the Seine from Argenteuil, where Monet was living. The canvas, 57 by 80 centimeters and number 341 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (inventory A I 1013). Some sources date it 1873, but the catalogue raisonné gives 1874.

What you are looking at

Most of the picture is a wide, flat meadow of ripening grass, painted in warm bands of straw yellow, ochre and green that run back to a low, blue line of distant hills. In the lower left foreground a woman in a white dress with a dark bodice reclines on the grass, her head under a dark hat, her skirts spread around her. Beside her lies a closed green parasol. Further off, near the center, a second figure in white stands alone in the field, and a third, smaller still, is just visible between them.

Slender young trees rise at intervals across the meadow: a tall, thin sapling at the far left whose leaves are mere dabs, a taller tree beside it, a rounded clump in the middle distance and, at the right, a dark group of trees and a single tall poplar bending in the breeze. Above, a pale blue summer sky with a few wisps of cloud takes up half the canvas.

How it was painted

The picture is all air and space. Monet keeps the horizon low and the figures small, and paints the grass with loose horizontal strokes that seem to vibrate in the heat. The shadow of the trees falls across the foreground in a long band of cooler green, which places the reclining woman in the shade and the rest of the field in full sun.

The woman is built from a few patches of white, blue-gray and black; she is less a portrait than a note of color that tells us the scale of the field. The thin trees, with their sparse, flickering leaves painted as individual touches against the sky, are typical of Monet's Argenteuil years. The paint is thin and fluid in the sky and thicker in the sunlit grass, where yellow is laid over green.

Argenteuil and Bezons

1874 was the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, in April, and the summer when Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir came to paint with Monet at Argenteuil. The figure in the meadow is usually taken to be Camille Monet, who appears in many open-air pictures of this period, such as Poppies of 1873, where she wades through a field with Jean, and the Woman with a Parasol of 1875. Bezons itself, still an agricultural village, lay just downstream on the opposite bank; its open fields were a short walk across the bridge from Monet's house.

The same summer produced Monet's Garden at Argenteuil and his views of The Bridge at Argenteuil, with its sailing boats and rebuilt road bridge. Compared with those, this picture is unusually empty, a landscape about the openness of a summer day, with figures scattered in it like the trees. Nothing happens; a woman rests in the shade, someone walks across a field. The subject is the heat, the light and the sense of space, and Monet trusts that to be enough. The flat land and wide sky recall The Plain of Sannois at Argenteuil of two years earlier. Our hub on Monet at Argenteuil gathers the paintings of these years.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin's Museum Island, part of the Berlin State Museums. The Nationalgalerie was one of the first public museums anywhere to buy French Impressionist paintings, under its director Hugo von Tschudi around 1900, against resistance from the imperial court. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.