Poplars at Giverny

Poplars at Giverny (Peupliers à Giverny) is a painting by Claude Monet of a stand of poplars near his home at Giverny, backlit by low sun. The Museum Barberini, which shows it as part of the Hasso Plattner Collection in Potsdam, dates it to 1887; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owned it from 1951 to 2015, dated it 1888 and called it Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise. It measures 74 by 92.5 centimeters and is signed at the lower left.

What you're looking at

There is no horizon, no ground to speak of and no distance. The canvas is filled from edge to edge by a screen of trees: a dozen or more poplars and smaller trees, their thin trunks rising from a strip of meadow along the bottom, their foliage reaching the top of the picture. The trunks are drawn in violet and rose. The leaves are short, flickering strokes of green, olive, yellow and blue, thicker in some trees and thin in others, so that the sky shows through.

The sky behind them is the real subject. It glows apricot, peach, pink and pale yellow, brightest at the right, where the sun seems to be just behind the trees, turning the foliage there gold and orange. On the left the light is cooler, pinkish lilac, and the trees are bluer. Through the gaps between the trunks, long vertical patches of yellow and orange light shine, like light seen through a fence. The meadow at the bottom is a band of green and blue-violet, with pink touches where the light falls on it. The signature, in red, sits at the lower left.

The Barberini notes the absence of a central focal point and of a horizon, and the abrupt cropping at the edges, which gives the picture a decorative flatness, as though the trees continued beyond the frame.

Giverny, 1887–88

In his first years at Giverny, Monet painted the meadows, grainstacks and rows of poplars on the plain around the village. He made two other poplar pictures in 1887 with figures, Under the Poplars, also in the Hasso Plattner Collection, and Poplars in the Sun in Stuttgart. Here there are no figures: only trees and light. The backlit effect, sun behind the trees, looks forward to the Haystacks of 1890–91, many of which are lit from behind at the end of the day.

How it was painted

The canvas is densely worked, with short, separate strokes of contrasting color laid over a warm ground. Monet uses complementaries, violet trunks against yellow light, blue leaves against orange sky, so that the whole surface shimmers. The verticals of the trunks and the dabs of leaves make a regular rhythm across the canvas, close to a pattern.

Before the Poplars series

Four years later, Monet would make a single line of poplars on the Epte the subject of more than twenty canvases, the Poplars series of 1891, such as Poplars on the Epte at Tate and Wind Effect, Row of Poplars at the Orsay. The cropped, all-over composition of Poplars at Giverny is an early step in that direction.

Provenance and where to see it

Monet sold the painting to Boussod, Valadon in 1892. It passed through Baron Denys Cochin and Durand-Ruel to Martin A. Ryerson of Chicago, who bequeathed it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933. The Art Institute deaccessioned it in the 1940s; after passing through New York dealers and the collection of William B. and Evelyn Jaffe, it was given to the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. MoMA sold it at Sotheby's, London, on 3 February 2015, explaining that it predated the starting point of its painting collection. It is now shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam with the Hasso Plattner Collection of Monet and the Impressionists. See also Monet's Giverny.