Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny

What you are looking at

A broad stripe of red poppies starts at the bottom edge of the canvas and narrows as it runs uphill into a fold between two grassy slopes. On either side the field is planted with something taller, grass or young grain, painted in long upright strokes of silvery green, blue-grey and straw. At lower left a patch of white flowers, perhaps daisies or chamomile, breaks into the green. Higher up, the slopes rise in bands of ocher, sage and pink to a ridge of dark, rounded trees. On the hillside sit a few dense bushes and two small, rust-colored mounds that look like stacks of hay or grain. A grey-white sky with a few patches of pale blue and violet cloud sits low over the ridge.

The poppies are not drawn as flowers at all. They are hundreds of separate touches of vermilion and orange-red, some with a dark dot of stem or shadow, laid over a darker green so that the red seems to flicker. Because the band narrows so sharply, it works like a path, pulling the eye straight up into the hollow.

Look at the right side of the field: the grain there is painted in a cooler blue-green and laid in long, wind-combed diagonals, quite different from the warm, short touches of the poppies. The contrast of two textures, as much as two colors, gives the picture its energy.

Giverny, 1885

Monet had moved to Giverny, on the Seine in Normandy, in the spring of 1883 with Alice Hoschedé and their combined children. In these first years, long before the water garden existed, he painted the surrounding countryside again and again: meadows, river banks, stacks in the fields and the chalky hills of the Seine valley. The hollow here is one of the small side valleys that cut into those hills.

Poppy fields were an old favorite, going back to A Field of Poppies at Argenteuil of 1873, but the Giverny poppies of 1885 are different in mood. There are no strolling figures and no parasols, just the land and its colors. The same summer produced Poppy Field around Giverny, now in the Musée d'Orsay, a flatter view across open fields.

How it was painted

This is a standard landscape canvas of about 65 by 81 centimeters, the size Monet carried into the fields in these years. The surface is built up in layers: a ground of greens and earth tones first, then the long vertical strokes of the grain, then the poppies dabbed over the top, often wet into wet so that a little green mixes into the red. The sky is the thinnest part, brushed in broadly. The viewpoint, low in the field and facing the slope, gives the composition its steep, funnel-like shape and hides the horizon behind the ridge.

Poppies and the series to come

The rust-colored mounds on the hillside are a reminder of what came next. Within a few years Monet would make the stacks in the fields near his house the subject of a full series, in our Haystacks hub, and in 1890 he painted a small group of poppy fields, among them Poppy Field in the Hermitage. Here the idea of filling most of a canvas with a single field of color is already present.

Meaning and style

Red against green is the most basic of complementary contrasts, and Monet uses it here at full strength. For Claude Monet the subject was the effect, not the place: the tag "near Giverny" is a location, not a story. The picture is also a record of farmland as it was, poppies thriving among the crops before modern herbicides cleared them.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds one of the largest groups of Monet paintings outside France; see our guide to Monet at the MFA Boston. For other early Giverny landscapes, see Meadow at Giverny and Haystacks at Giverny.