Poplars on the Epte (Edinburgh)

What you are looking at

The canvas is almost square. On the right, a line of tall, slender poplars rises from the riverbank, their trunks pale and their foliage a light, flickering green; the row bends away to the left in a gentle curve, the trees getting smaller and bluer until they meet the horizon in a soft band of green near the left edge. Above, a summer sky is filled with heaped white cumulus clouds over patches of blue. Below, the river Epte takes up the bottom half of the picture, and in it the trees and the clouds appear again, softer and broken by ripples.

Everything is light and warm. The palette is made of pale greens, yellows, creams and blues, with touches of pink and lilac in the trunks and the clouds. There is no figure, no boat and no building.

Look at the trunks. In the sky they are thin, separate verticals; in the water their reflections run down in wavering streaks of lilac and gold that are almost as strong as the trees themselves. The picture is close to symmetrical about the line of the far bank, and that doubling is what gives it its stillness.

The season is high summer: the leaves are full, the light is warm, and the clouds are the fair-weather kind that build over the Seine valley on hot afternoons. Other canvases in the series show the same trees in the pink and orange of autumn or under a grey, windy sky, which is the point of a series. The trees stay; the weather and the hour change.

Where and when it was painted

In the spring of 1891 Monet found his motif on the river Epte, which flows into the Seine near Giverny: a line of tall poplars on the bank at Limetz, a little upstream from his house, that curved along a bend in the river. He painted them from his studio boat, moored among the reeds, from spring into autumn, keeping several canvases on board and changing from one to another as the light shifted. When the local commune put the trees up for sale for timber, Monet paid the buyer to leave them standing until he had finished. The series runs to about two dozen canvases, and fifteen were shown together at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in February and March 1892.

This canvas belongs to the group that shows the trees from the side, as a curving line along the bank, with their reflections taking half the picture. Others look up at the trunks from close to the water and cut off their tops, such as Poplars on the Epte in London, or reduce them to a few stripes against the sky, as in The Four Trees at the Met. Compare also the autumn colors of Poplars, Three Pink Trees, Autumn and Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte, both in Philadelphia. For the series, see Monet's Poplars.

How it was painted

The square format is unusual for Monet and suits the motif: it gives equal weight to sky and water and lets the curve of trees cross the middle of the canvas like a hinge. The paint is applied in short, separate strokes that sit side by side without blending, especially in the foliage and the water, so the surface shimmers. The clouds are thicker and creamier than the sky around them.

Painting from the boat put Monet at water level. That low viewpoint explains why the far bank is so close to the horizon and why the reflections dominate. It also links the Poplars to what came next: within a few years he would be painting the surface of his own water-lily pond at Giverny, where the reflected sky became the whole subject. For the village and its river, see Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

Where to see it

The painting, catalogued by Wildenstein as number 1310, has been in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland since 1925 (NG 1651). It hangs in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound in Edinburgh, which also owns one of Monet's grainstacks, Haystacks, Snow Effect. Admission to the permanent collection is free. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.