Poppy Field

What you are looking at

A field of poppies fills the whole lower half of the canvas, a wide band of pink, coral and red dabs laid over green, running right across the picture with no path, figure or fence to interrupt it. Behind the field a line of rounded trees and bushes, painted in cool blue-greens, marks the edge of the meadow. Right of center, three or four tall poplars rise together in a tight cluster, darker and more defined than anything else, their tops breaking the line of the hills.

The hills behind are a soft blue band. Above them the sky is pale and luminous, with a few drifting clouds tinted lilac and gray. The light is even and diffused, a hazy summer day rather than bright sun, and the poppies are seen as a mass of color rather than as individual flowers.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted poppy fields around Giverny many times after settling there in 1883. The flat meadows of the Epte and Seine valleys turned red in early summer, and he returned to them through the 1880s and again in 1890, the year he bought the Giverny house he had been renting.

The date of this canvas varies in the sources. The Wildenstein catalogue raisonné, where it is number 1255, places it in 1890, which would make it one of a group of poppy fields painted that summer, alongside Oat and Poppy Field in Strasbourg. Other references, including some museum and encyclopedia entries, date it to the later 1880s. The clump of poplars and the flat, open composition fit well with the work of 1890, when Monet was moving toward the series paintings of haystacks and poplars.

How it was painted

The picture is almost abstract in its organization: three horizontal bands of field, trees and sky, with a single vertical accent in the poplars. Monet places that accent off-center, which keeps the composition from feeling static.

The field is built from countless short strokes of pink and red over a base of green, with flecks of white and pale yellow. Red against green, two complementary colors, makes each strengthen the other, and from a distance the field seems to glow. The distant trees are painted in cool blues and greens, thin and soft, so they recede. The poplars are given darker, more saturated greens and long vertical strokes, which pull them forward. In the sky, short horizontal strokes of lilac and white suggest moving cloud.

There are no figures. Earlier poppy fields often included Camille, Jean or the Hoschedé children walking through the flowers; by 1890 Monet had largely removed people from his landscapes, leaving the field, the trees and the weather to carry the picture. The emptiness makes the color the subject.

Poppies and poplars

The canvas brings together two of Monet's favorite motifs of these years. Poppies appear in his work from Poppy Field (Argenteuil) of 1873, with Camille and Jean walking through the flowers, to Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny of 1885. The poplars point ahead to the Poplars series of 1891, painted on the banks of the Epte a little upstream. Here both motifs are still parts of a broad landscape, in the same spirit as Haystack at Giverny.

Ownership

The painting entered the Hermitage in 1948, when the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow was dissolved and its collection, built from the confiscated holdings of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, was divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage. It is inventory number ГЭ-9004.

Where to see it

Poppy Field is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the Impressionist paintings hang in the General Staff Building across Palace Square. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.