Poppy Field, Around Giverny

What you are looking at

The picture is three bands stacked one above the other. At the bottom, filling more than a third of the canvas, is a field so thick with poppies that it is more red than green, a carpet of small vermilion and pink dabs over yellow-green stalks. In the middle, a line of trees, hedges and the pale walls and roofs of a few houses runs across the picture. Above them rise the rounded hills of the valley, striped with fields and chalky slopes in green, yellow and blue. The top third is sky: a strong blue torn by big white clouds blowing from the left.

There are no figures. Unlike the famous Argenteuil poppy picture of 1873, with Camille and Jean strolling through the flowers, this is a pure landscape, and its subject is the summer wind as much as the flowers. You can feel it in the sky, where the clouds are dragged across in long diagonal strokes, and in the field, where the dabs of red lean the same way.

The detail people miss is how little red there actually is. Look closely and most of the field is green, ochre and violet; the poppies are scattered touches placed on top. Monet relies on the eye to mix them into a single blaze at a distance.

Where and when it was painted

Monet moved to Giverny, a village on the Seine in Normandy about 75 kilometers from Paris, in April 1883, with his two sons and Alice Hoschedé and her six children. For the first years there he painted the countryside around the village much more than his garden: the meadows by the river Epte, the hillsides, the fields of poppies and oats. This canvas of 1885 belongs to that campaign. Its companion, Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny in Boston, was painted the same summer; there the field dips into a hollow and the hills close in. For Giverny before the water garden, see Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

How it was painted

The canvas, 66 by 81.5 centimeters, is close to the standard size Monet used outdoors. The paint in the field is thick and broken, the strokes short and crowded, while the hills are brushed in broader, smoother bands and the sky in long sweeps. That change of handling from bottom to top is what creates depth, since the composition itself is almost flat.

Monet came back to poppies again and again. Compare the earlier Poppy Field (Poppies at Argenteuil) of 1873 and Poppy Field near Vétheuil of 1879, and the later Champ d'avoine aux coquelicots of 1890, where the poppies are woven into a field of oats. Over these years the flowers become less of a subject and more of a color field.

The red-green pairing is the oldest trick in Monet's book, and the most effective. Red and green are complementary colors: set side by side in small touches, each makes the other look more intense. A field of poppies gave him a natural excuse to use the contrast at full strength, and a reason to keep coming back to it for almost twenty years.

A looted painting

The picture has an unusual history. It was seized in France by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In 1949 it was found in the hands of a private individual in Bavaria, passed through the Allied Munich Central Collecting Point that May and June, and was returned to France. Because its pre-war owner has not been identified, it belongs to the special category of Musées Nationaux Récupération (MNR): works recovered after the war and held by the French national museums in trust until their rightful owners or heirs claim them. It is registered as MNR 639 under the custody of the Musée d'Orsay.

Where to see it

Since 1954 the painting has been on deposit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, which has one of the best Impressionist collections in France outside Paris. See where to see Monet's paintings, Monet at the Musée d'Orsay for the national collection it belongs to, and the Claude Monet page.