Giverny Landscape

What you are looking at

A single tree stands at the far left, its thin trunk rising almost to the top of the canvas and its branches thrown out to the right in looping, calligraphic lines of dark brown, green and blue. Behind it a broad band of rust-red field crosses the picture, probably plowed earth or a ripening crop. Beyond the field, a valley opens in a haze of grey-green and lilac: low roofs and walls, the rounded shapes of trees or stacks, and a hillside that fades into a sky of the same misty color. Along the very bottom runs a strip of green growth. The signature is at lower left.

The weather is the real subject. The sky is laid in with long, slanting strokes that run down to the right, and the branches seem to stream the same way, as though a gust of wind and rain were sweeping across the valley. The far village is barely more than a few pale rectangles.

Look at the branches closely. They are not modeled at all but drawn with the brush in quick curling lines, some ending in small hooks and loops. Few passages in Monet's work of the 1880s are this close to pure drawing in paint.

Where and when it was painted

Monet had settled at Giverny, in the Seine valley about 75 kilometers from Paris, in 1883. In his first years there he painted the meadows, poplars, willows and fields around the village rather than his garden, often in changing weather. In 1887 he worked on the meadows and on figures in boats on the river Epte; the same year produced Poplars in the Sun and Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny. A year earlier he had painted Willows at Giverny and Haystack at Giverny. For the village and its subjects, see Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

How it was painted

The composition is built on a strong contrast between the near and the far: one dark, linear tree against a soft, nearly formless background. The red field is a horizontal band that separates them. This device, a single tree pushed to the edge and cut by the frame, goes back to Monet's study of Japanese prints, which he collected, and it reappears in his Mediterranean pictures and in the poplars of 1891.

The handling is fast. The field is scrubbed in with horizontal strokes, the sky with diagonal ones, and the tree is drawn on top when the paint beneath was already laid. It reads as a picture made in one or two sessions.

A tradition repeated in some Spanish-language sources says Monet saw this view from a train window and links its mood to his relationship with Alice Hoschedé; there is no documentary support for either claim, and they are best treated as legend.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 1123 and is now in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, the museum of the Carlos Slim Foundation, which has a substantial group of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. The museum also owns Monet's Landscape in Port-Villez. Its dimensions are not published in the sources consulted here. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.