Les Peupliers

What you are looking at

A tight group of poplars stands on the left side of an almost square canvas. Their trunks are thin, dark and wavering, five or six of them close together, and their foliage forms one tall column of bright yellow-green, flecked with blue where it turns into shadow. The right half of the picture is sky: a strong blue at the top, crossed by long diagonal streaks of white cloud that sweep down to the right and pale to cream near the horizon. Low across the middle runs a distant line of trees in blue and green, and at the bottom a band of yellow and ocher meadow fills the foreground.

There is no river here. That is the first thing to notice. Almost every other canvas in the series looks across the Epte from water level; this one stands on the boggy ground beside it, and the trees are seen against open sky with grass at their feet. The diagonal brushwork in the clouds gives the picture a sense of wind and movement that the more static river views lack.

The signature, Claude Monet, is at lower right.

The poplars of 1891

Between spring and autumn 1891 Claude Monet worked on some two dozen canvases of a line of poplars beside the river Epte, about two kilometers upstream from his home at Giverny. Most were painted from his rowing boat or studio boat on the river. Fifteen were shown together at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris early the following year and were a commercial success.

The Fitzwilliam describes this as one of only two canvases in the Poplars series seen from the marsh. That changes everything about the composition: without the water there are no reflections and no horizontal axis at mid-height, and the trees become a single tall mass set off-center against a large field of sky.

How it was painted

The canvas measures 89 by 92 centimeters. Monet painted it with vigorous, open strokes. The foliage is built from short, curling touches of yellow-green, emerald and ultramarine, laid wet into wet; the trunks are drawn over them in long, slightly broken lines of dark green, brown and blue. The sky is the most energetic passage: broad diagonal swipes of white and pale blue dragged over a deeper blue, so that the cloud seems to be blowing across the picture.

The palette is the bright, sunlit one of the summer canvases, with yellows and greens at full strength and blue reserved for shadow and distance. The foreground meadow is handled loosely, a few horizontal sweeps of yellow ocher with touches of pink and green.

How this version differs

Set it beside Three Poplars, Summer or the Tate's Poplars on the Epte and the difference is immediate. Those pictures are organized as grids of verticals and their reflections. This one is asymmetrical and open, closer in spirit to Monet's earlier poplar pictures around Giverny, such as Poplars at Giverny, than to the strict decorative scheme of the 1891 river views. It is a summer picture, under a high, moving sky, and has none of the screen-like flatness of the overcast or autumn canvases.

The poplars and the Haystacks

The poplars followed directly on the Grainstacks, which Monet had shown at Durand-Ruel's in May 1891 to great success. The Fitzwilliam canvas, with its open meadow and big sky, is the one that most recalls the fields of the Grainstacks, painted only a short walk away. But where the stacks are squat, solid shapes sitting on the ground, the poplars are tall and weightless, and Monet sets them against moving air rather than still light. Seen together, the two series show him testing how far a single, ordinary rural motif could carry a whole body of work.

Ownership and where to see it

The museum traces the painting back to the artist's studio. It later passed through the London dealer Gimpel Fils, from whom Captain S. W. Sykes bought it in 1950, and Sykes bequeathed it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1966 (accession PD.9-1966). The Fitzwilliam dates it 1891; some catalogues give 1891–92. It hangs with the museum's French Impressionist paintings in Cambridge. For other public collections, see our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.