Meadow with Poplars

Meadow with Poplars is a summer landscape Claude Monet painted around 1875, during his years at Argenteuil on the Seine northwest of Paris. Signed at the lower right, it measures 54.6 by 65.4 centimeters and is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a 1923 bequest of David P. Kimball in memory of his wife, Clara Bertram Kimball. The image is sometimes titled Poplars near Argenteuil.

What you're looking at

Two poplars rise on the left side of the canvas, one tall and dense, dark green with blue shadows, the other lighter and partly behind it, catching the sun in yellow-green. Their tops nearly touch the upper edge of the picture. Behind them, at the far left, a row of paler, more distant poplars stands in blue haze.

The rest of the picture is meadow and sky. The meadow fills the lower half, a tumble of wildflowers painted in small dabs of white, yellow, lilac, blue and pink, thicker and more varied in the foreground. In the lower right, a handful of bright red poppies stand out. A small figure, a child in white with a yellow straw hat, wades through the flowers just right of the trees, nearly lost in the grass. On the horizon, at the right, a low line of blue hills and fields shows several small rounded stacks of grain, gray-mauve in the distance.

Above, a summer sky of clear blue with big, piled-up white clouds, edged in pink and lavender, takes up almost half the canvas.

Argenteuil in the mid-1870s

Monet lived at Argenteuil from the end of 1871 to early 1878, and painted the fields above the town as well as its river. Summer meadows with figures were a favorite theme, as in Poppy Field of 1873 at the Musée d'Orsay, in which Camille and Jean walk through a field of poppies. Meadow with Poplars is a quieter variant: the figure is tiny, and the trees and sky take over. For the whole period, see Monet at Argenteuil.

How it was painted

The canvas is a small, standard size, the kind Monet carried into the fields. The trees are built with dense, overlapping strokes of several greens; the meadow with quick flicks and dots of bright color; the clouds with thick, creamy paint pushed around with the brush. The flowers in the foreground are larger and more separate, those in the distance smaller and merged, which is how Monet creates depth without lines.

Poplars and grainstacks before the series

The Museum of Fine Arts notes that this picture is an early treatment of two motifs Monet would later make famous in series: grainstacks and poplars. Fifteen years later, at Giverny, he would paint the stacks in the Haystacks and then, in 1891, a row of poplars on the Epte in the Poplars series, such as Poplars on the Epte in Edinburgh and Wind Effect, Row of Poplars at the Orsay. Here the trees are still part of a scene, not yet a pattern repeated across many canvases. Compare also Under the Poplars of 1887, painted at Giverny, where figures again walk among flowers below a line of poplars.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds one of the largest collections of Monet's work anywhere. See Monet at the MFA Boston.