Path on the Island of Saint Martin, Vétheuil

Path on the Island of Saint Martin, Vétheuil is a summer landscape by Claude Monet in which a narrow footpath winds up through tall green wheat scattered with red poppies toward the village of Vétheuil and its church. Signed and dated 1881 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 678, it came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2011 as a gift of John C. and Chara C. Haas, part of the museum's 125th-anniversary acquisitions.

What you're looking at

The canvas is upright, unusual for a Monet landscape of these years, and the format pulls the eye up the path. In the foreground a sandy track begins at the bottom center and curves left and back through tall grass and green wheat, painted in long, flicking vertical strokes of blue-green, silver and yellow. Red poppies are scattered on both sides, thickest at the left, each a single dab or two of vermilion.

In the middle distance the field turns golden where riper wheat catches the sun. Beyond, a row of dark cypress-like poplars and taller trees stands in front of the village, and in the center, between them, rises the tower and nave of Vétheuil's church, in pale stone. Behind, a long green-and-ocher hill with cultivated strips closes the view. The upper third is a bright summer sky of blue with heaped white clouds, brushed in diagonal strokes. The signature and date are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

The Île Saint-Martin is a long island in the Seine opposite Vétheuil, where Monet lived from 1878 to the end of 1881. Its fields of wheat and meadows gave him summer motifs to set against the river views and winter scenes of those years. By the summer of 1881 his circumstances were improving, with Durand-Ruel buying again, and the Vétheuil pictures of that year are some of the brightest of the period; at the end of the year he left for Poissy. See Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

The surface is thick and varied. Monet paints the grass with long, wet, curving strokes that seem to bend in the breeze, sets the poppies on top as thick, unblended touches, and lays the sky in looser, thinner diagonals. The path, in pale ocher and lilac with blue shadows, is the one area of calm, and it leads the eye from the bottom edge to the church. The vertical format and the winding path recall the compositions of traditional landscape painting, but the handling is fully Impressionist.

How it compares

The poppy fields around Vétheuil appear in Poppy Field near Vétheuil in Zürich. For the village seen from the river, see Vétheuil in Summer at the Met, and for his garden on the hillside above, The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil in Washington. The flowering path through a field connects back to the Argenteuil poppy pictures such as Poppy Field of 1873.

Leaving Vétheuil

The summer of 1881 was the last Monet spent at Vétheuil. At the end of the year Monet, Alice Hoschedé and the eight children moved downstream to Poissy, a town Monet disliked. In April 1883 they settled at Giverny. Seen in that light, this bright, open picture of the Vétheuil fields reads as a farewell to a place where he had known great hardship and also painted some of his most varied work.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (accession 2011-58-2), one of several Impressionist works given by the Haas family in 2011. The museum also holds Monet's The Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam and other canvases. For other places to see Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.