Poplars in the Sun

What you are looking at

A field of tall grass and wildflowers, yellow, gold and pale green, fills the lower third of the canvas. Four tall poplars rise from it on the right, their thin trunks dark against the light, their crowns a shimmering mass of blue-green and white leaves that runs off the top edge. A single rounded tree stands alone at the left, and behind it a line of smaller, upright poplars and blue hills marks the far edge of the plain.

In the middle of the field, under the poplars, a woman in a pale dress walks toward us holding a green parasol, her face shaded. To the left a small figure, a child, crouches in the grass, picking flowers. The sky is pale and hazy, almost white, and the whole picture is suffused with spring sunlight.

Where and when it was painted

By 1887 Monet had lived at Giverny for four years with Alice Hoschedé and their eight children. He still traveled to paint, to the Normandy coast, Belle-Île and Holland, but the fields around the village were becoming a constant source of motifs. This canvas shows the plain of Les Essarts at Limetz, just across the Epte from Giverny.

The woman is usually taken to be one of the Hoschedé daughters, who often posed for Monet in these years. Suzanne Hoschedé is the likeliest candidate: she had been the model for the two great figures with parasols of 1886, Woman with a Parasol Turned to the Left and Turned to the Right, and the flower detail on her hat appears to repeat one she wore in an earlier picture.

How it was painted

The foreground grass and the child are treated summarily, in quick, loose strokes of yellow and green, so that the eye passes over them to the woman at the center. She too is only suggested, her face and dress a few strokes, but she is placed exactly where the light is strongest, under the trees, with the green parasol as a single bright accent.

The poplars are the real structure of the picture. Their trunks are thin dark lines; their foliage is painted with countless small, flickering touches of blue, green and white that seem to move in the wind. Monet lets them run off the top of the canvas, so they seem taller than the frame can hold. A gradation of color, from warm yellows in front to cool blues in the distance, creates depth without any line of perspective.

The picture is a close cousin of the parasol figures of 1886, but calmer. There the figure stood on a rise against the sky, her dress whipped by the wind; here she walks through the field at the same level as the viewer, and the trees, not the figure, dominate. It is a step on the way from figure painting to pure landscape, which Monet would take fully in the series of the 1890s.

Toward the Poplars series

Four years later Monet would return to poplars along the Epte, a little upstream, and paint them as a series of more than twenty canvases, making the trees the sole subject. In those pictures, such as The Four Trees and Poplars on the Epte, the trunks become an almost abstract grid. In 1887 the poplars are still part of a pastoral scene with figures, but the idea of the tall row cut off by the frame is already here. See the Poplars series.

Ownership

The painting was probably bought from Monet by the baritone and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure, one of his earliest supporters. In 1906 it was acquired by the Stuttgarter Galerieverein, the friends' association of what is now the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, as its first purchase (inventory GVL 16), an early instance of a German museum collecting Monet. The museum marked the centenary of the acquisition in 2006.

Where to see it

Poplars in the Sun is in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. For other museums with Monet's work, see where to see Monet's paintings.