Plum Trees in Bloom

Plum Trees in Bloom (also called Flowering Plum Trees or Vétheuil, Flowering Plum Trees) is an 1879 painting by Claude Monet of an orchard in white blossom below the roofs of Vétheuil, the Seine village where he lived from 1878 to 1881. The canvas, 64.5 × 81 cm, is in the Museum of Fine Arts (Szépművészeti Múzeum) in Budapest (inv. 266.B), and is number 520 in Wildenstein's catalogue.

What you are looking at

The picture is stacked in three bands. At the top, a hillside of fields rises steeply to a soft ridge, laid in with long diagonal strokes of green, ocher, rose and pale yellow that follow the slope. Above it, a sliver of sky in blue and cream, with loose clouds.

In the middle band, half buried in blossom, the village: a large house at left with a steep brown roof and paired chimneys, then a jumble of smaller roofs in brick red and rust stepping off to the right. Monet does not draw them so much as block them in, a few strokes of roof, a dark patch for a window, a pale patch for a sunlit wall.

The lower two-thirds of the canvas belong to the orchard. Young plum trees stand at irregular intervals in tall grass, their thin trunks leaning in different directions. Their crowns are not shapes at all but clouds of thick, short dabs of white, cream and pale yellow-green. At the right edge a taller tree rises almost to the top of the canvas, its blossom breaking over the hillside, with a forked dark trunk at the bottom right.

How it was painted

The grass is the most energetic part of the picture. Monet lays it in with long, slanting strokes of blue-green, emerald and yellow-green, flecked everywhere with white, perhaps fallen petals or spring flowers, so the whole ground seems to ripple in the wind. The direction of these strokes changes across the canvas, which keeps the eye moving.

The blossom, by contrast, is built up in impasto, short loaded touches that sit on top of the surface and catch real light. The few dark branches are drawn last, in thin lines of brown and purple, to hold the clouds of white in place. There is almost no hard shadow anywhere: this is the diffuse light of a bright, slightly hazy spring day.

A signature appears at lower left. The painting has the directness of work done outdoors, in front of the motif, as most of Monet's Vétheuil landscapes were.

Vétheuil, spring 1879

Monet moved to Vétheuil, a village on a loop of the Seine northwest of Paris, in 1878. He shared a house with his wife Camille, their sons Jean and Michel, and Alice Hoschedé with her six children, after the bankruptcy of Alice's husband Ernest, once Monet's patron. Money was very short, and Camille was seriously ill after Michel's birth in March 1878. She died at Vétheuil on 5 September 1879, the subject of Camille Monet on Her Deathbed.

The spring of that year is therefore poignant in hindsight. Monet painted the village and its surroundings in every season: in snow in Road into Vétheuil in Winter, in summer in Poppy Field near Vétheuil, and two years later in his own sunflower garden in The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil.

What does it mean?

There is no hidden symbolism to decode. Monet was after the particular light of an April day, when white blossom glows against green and nothing casts a sharp shadow. Paintings like this were also commercial: flowering orchards sold, and he badly needed sales. Yet the handling is anything but routine, and the hillside, simplified into broad planes of color, looks ahead to the way he would later reduce landscape to fields of color.

Blossoming trees became a recurring motif for Claude Monet; at Giverny he returned to it in pictures such as Spring (1886).

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts (Szépművészeti Múzeum) in Budapest, which also owns Three Fishing Boats (1885). For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.