Poplars, Three Pink Trees, Autumn

What you are looking at

Three poplar trunks run straight up through the canvas and off the top edge, like the strings of an instrument. They are spaced almost evenly: the left one close to the frame, the middle one a little left of center, the right one well in from the edge. Their bark is painted in warm cream and coral, and small tufts of orange leaves cling to them in a broken line. Behind them a second row of trees curves away along the bank, its foliage a soft cloud of pink and apricot that thickens at the right into a dense, rounded mass of russet. Below, a dark band of riverbank in violet, green and blue crosses the picture, and under that the Epte reflects the scene in pale turquoise and rose.

The sky is the largest single area of the painting and the most worked: a mesh of tiny strokes in lavender, blue and white, applied over one another until the surface has a thick, chalky texture. It deepens to a stronger blue at upper right, which makes the orange foliage there glow. Against it, the three trunks hold the composition in place, and the flatness of the arrangement is deliberate. There is little depth, just layers stacked like stage scenery: trunks, background trees, bank, water.

Look at the reflections at the bottom: the three trunks reappear as short, wavering verticals in cream and gold, cut off by the frame almost as soon as they start.

Where and when

The trees stood on the Epte near Limetz, a short way upstream from Monet's house at Giverny. They were commune property, planted for timber, and they went to auction in 1891 while Monet was still painting them; he came to terms with the timber merchant to keep them up a little longer. Working from his studio boat, he could move between canvases as the light changed, which is how such closely related variants came about. This one was painted in the autumn, when the leaves had turned and the sun was low.

How it was painted

The canvas is just under a meter high. Monet laid in the design simply, three verticals and two horizontals, and then built the color over several sessions in small, dry, overlapping strokes. The sky's crust shows how much reworking he did, probably partly in the studio. The trunks were left until late and painted over the sky with loaded strokes of light paint, which is why they stand slightly proud of the surface.

The three-tree canvases

Within the Poplars series is a group of pictures showing just three or four trunks close up, cut by the top of the frame, painted in different weather: grey, spring sun, summer wind and autumn. This is the autumn version, and with The Four Trees at the Met it is the most famous. Three Poplars, Summer in Tokyo shows nearly the same arrangement in green. Seen together, the variants show Monet treating a fixed design almost like a printmaker pulling states of the same plate, each in a different color key. Compare also the full row in Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte, which hangs in the same museum.

Meaning

There is no story, and the title is purely descriptive. What the picture communicates is a sensation: the pink glow of autumn foliage lit by a low sun, and the stillness of the river. The strict geometry also points ahead. Critics have long seen in these vertical bands, and in the late water lilies, a step toward the decorative, flattened painting of the following century. For Claude Monet, though, it remained a record of one place at one time of year.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which also owns a second canvas from the series. For other museums with Monet's poplars, see where to see Monet's paintings.