Meadow at Giverny

What you are looking at

More than half of this canvas is grass. A meadow fills the lower part of the picture, flat and almost featureless, painted as a dense weave of short strokes in yellow-green, ochre, lilac and rose. Across the middle runs a band of trees: two rounded, leafy trees just right of center, a thin poplar rising sharply at the right, and on the far left a dark cypress-like column with a low bush beside it, all softened by haze. Behind them a long hill fades into mist. The sky is not blue at all but a pale, creamy yellow and pink, brushed in long diagonal strokes, as if the air itself were full of light.

The format is unusual for a landscape. The canvas is nearly square and slightly taller than wide, about 93 × 82 cm, which lets the empty meadow occupy the foreground and pushes the trees high up the picture.

Giverny, 1888

Monet moved to Giverny, a village on the Seine in Normandy, in 1883, and stayed there until his death in 1926. Before he dug his famous water-lily pond in the 1890s, his subject was the countryside around the house: the meadows along the little river Epte, the rows of poplars, the haystacks in the fields. In 1888 and 1889 he painted these meadows again and again, often in summer heat or morning haze.

This is the moment just before the great series. Within two years Monet would paint the Grainstacks and then the Poplars, repeating one motif under changing light. Meadow at Giverny already shows that way of thinking: there is no story and no figure, only a field, some trees and a particular quality of air.

Close looking

Stand back and the meadow reads as flat green. Look closer and it is made of thousands of separate touches of color, many of them not green at all: violet in the shadows, pink and orange where the sun catches seed heads, pale yellow where the grass is dry. Monet puts complementary colors side by side so that they shimmer when the eye mixes them, the technique that critics called optical mixture.

The sky does something similar in reverse. Its yellow and pink are crossed by violet strokes that also run into the hills, so the distance seems to dissolve. The trees are barely solid: the two central trees are built of loose green and lilac dabs, and the poplar at the right is a few vertical strokes of purple. Tiny reddish marks scattered on the far edge of the meadow may be cattle or flowers; Monet leaves them deliberately undecided.

The meadow as a motif

Monet's meadows at Giverny lay between his house and the river Epte, flat, damp pastureland bordered by willows and poplars. He could carry his canvases there in minutes, and he returned in different seasons and at different hours, sometimes with several canvases on the go and switching between them as the light changed. That habit of working on many canvases of one motif at once, ready for different moments of the day, is the method that produced the series of the 1890s.

Most of his meadow paintings include something to anchor the eye: a figure, a haystack, a row of poplars along the water. In this canvas the anchor is reduced to a handful of trees in the middle distance, and even they dissolve in the haze, which is why the picture feels so advanced for 1888. It is closer in spirit to the late water-lily canvases than to the crisp seaside views of his youth.

Why it matters

To many of Monet's contemporaries a picture like this, with no subject and no focal point, looked unfinished. That is exactly why it matters. Monet was shifting the subject of painting from things to the light and atmosphere between things, a move that leads directly to his late, near-abstract Water Lilies.

Provenance

The painting belonged to the Moscow textile merchant Sergei Shchukin, one of the boldest collectors of modern French art. After the Russian Revolution his collection was nationalized in 1918 and became part of the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. When that museum was dissolved in 1948, its holdings were divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad, where this painting now hangs.

A different Monet with a similar title, Meadow at Giverny of 1886, belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the two should not be confused.

Related works

Compare Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny, Haystacks at Giverny, Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny and Willows in Giverny. The wider story is in Famous Monet Paintings.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, whose Impressionist galleries are in the General Staff Building.