Poplars at the Banks of Epte

What you are looking at

Unlike most of the Poplars, this canvas looks along the row rather than straight across the river at it. A cluster of tall, slender trunks rises at the left, catching warm late-day light, their feathery crowns massing into a dark blue-green silhouette that runs almost to the top edge. From there the row swings away to the right in a long, low curve, the trees shrinking with distance until they become a ribbon of green and gold along the horizon. The foreground is a strip of meadow and marsh in ocher, green and violet, and above everything is a wide, broken sky of lilac-blue with small, high white clouds.

The handling is dense and even. The sky is built from short, crisscrossing strokes that give it the same woven texture as the foliage, so tree and air feel made of one substance. Look at the trunks in the near group: each is a single wavering line of light paint, edged on one side with blue shadow, and they are not quite parallel, which keeps the group from looking like a fence. Low down among them, the meadow is lit in yellow, as if the sun were coming in from the left behind us.

The nearer crowns are where the picture is most worked. Monet lays dark blue-greens over lighter yellow-greens and leaves gaps through which the sky shows, so the foliage seems to move. In the distant row the same trees are reduced to a few vertical flicks each, a change of scale that does the work of perspective without any drawn lines.

Where and when

The trees stood in single file along a marshy stretch of the Epte near Limetz, a short way upstream from Monet's house at Giverny. He began painting them in the late spring of 1891 and continued into the autumn. Most of the series was painted from his floating studio, a boat moored opposite the row, which explains why so many canvases look straight across the water at the trunks. This is one of the exceptions: here Monet set up on the meadow side, where the curve of the row could be seen whole. Wildenstein's catalogue groups it with a small set of views taken from the marsh and dates it 1891–92.

The trees were not Monet's to keep. They belonged to the commune of Limetz, which put them up for auction partway through the campaign; Monet came to an arrangement with the timber merchant who bought them so that they would stay standing until he had finished.

How it was painted

The near-square format, about 88 by 93 centimeters, is unusual in the series. It gives the picture more of the character of a conventional landscape: there is a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon, and the eye travels into depth along the curve of the row. In the tall, narrow canvases, by contrast, the trunks run off the top of the frame and the picture reads as a flat pattern of verticals. The brushwork, however, is the same: small, dry, overlapping touches, applied over several sessions, that knit sky and foliage together.

The Poplars series

The Epte poplars are among Monet's most celebrated series, gathered in our Poplars hub. They followed the success of the haystacks in 1891, and a group was shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in early 1892. Compare this sweeping view with the tight, frontal Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte in Philadelphia, the three trunks of Poplars, Three Pink Trees, Autumn, and The Four Trees in New York. Poplars on the Epte at Tate shows the row seen across the water in similar summer light.

Meaning

The poplars were planted as a commercial crop, destined for timber, which gives the series an undertone of impermanence. But the paintings are less elegy than experiment. With the motif fixed in place, Claude Monet could study how a change of hour or season altered every color, and the row's curve gave him a ready-made rhythm of verticals and a receding line.

Where is it now?

The painting is in a private collection and is rarely exhibited. Many canvases from the series are in public museums in Philadelphia, New York, London, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Tokyo; our guide on where to see Monet's paintings lists them by city.