Poplars on the Epte (London)

What you are looking at

We look up from the water at a stand of tall poplars. Their trunks rise in thin, wavering lines of grey, brown and green almost to the top of the canvas, and their foliage is not a solid mass but a series of loose, rounded clumps of blue-green and violet hung along the trunks. Behind them, a bright sky of strong blue is crossed by heaped white clouds, which show through the gaps between the trees. Along the bottom runs a dark band of riverbank and bushes, and below it a sliver of water catches the white of the clouds.

The format is upright, and the picture is all verticals: six or seven trunks spaced across it like the bars of a screen, with the sky behind. The effect is airy, breezy and slightly unstable, as if the trees were swaying.

The detail most people miss is how blue the trees are. Seen against a brilliant sky, the leaves lose their green and turn the color of the shadows, and Monet paints them almost the same blue as the sky, set off only by darker violet edges. The white clouds behind the trunks do the work of making the trees visible.

The day is windy. The clouds are piled and torn, the foliage is broken into separate tufts, and the trunks are not ruled straight but bend slightly, as tall poplars do in a breeze. Monet catches a moment of movement in a motif that, in other canvases of the series, he painted perfectly still.

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 views that look up at the trunks from close to the water, rather than along the line of trees. Compare the side view of the curving row in Poplars on the Epte in Edinburgh, the radically simplified The Four Trees at the Met, and Three Poplars, Summer in Tokyo. For the whole series, see Monet's Poplars; for the setting, Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

How it was painted

The canvas, 92.4 by 73.7 centimeters, is larger than many in the series. Monet laid in the sky first, then painted the trunks over it in long, dragged strokes and built up the foliage in curling dabs. The clouds are thick, creamy white, painted around and over the edges of the trees so that sky and leaves interlock. The handling is quick and confident, and parts of the canvas, especially at the bottom, are left fairly thin.

Looking up from a boat, Monet removed the ground almost completely. What remains is a pattern of verticals against a moving sky, close to the decorative, flattened designs of Japanese prints that he collected, and an early step toward the all-over surfaces of the late Water Lilies.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting, catalogued by Wildenstein as number 1300, belongs to Tate (N04183), which received it in 1926. It has long been lent to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square (L717), where it usually hangs with the gallery's other Impressionist pictures; it appeared in the National Gallery's exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting in 2015. Admission to the permanent collection is free. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.