Poppy Field near Vétheuil

Poppy Field near Vétheuil is a summer landscape Claude Monet painted around 1879, when he was living at Vétheuil, a village on the Seine northwest of Paris. A meadow blazing with red poppies fills the lower half of the canvas, and a woman and three children wade through it gathering flowers. Beyond the river, the village climbs a hillside crowned by its church tower. The painting belongs to the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection and has been on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich since 2021.

What you're looking at

The poppy field stretches across the whole width of the picture. Monet paints it with hundreds of small strokes of vermilion and orange-red over a ground of green, pink and violet grasses, dense in the foreground and smaller and closer together as the field recedes. Four figures stand in the poppies: a woman in a pale dress and red hat at left center, with a bunch of flowers; a child in white toward the middle; another child in a blue smock and straw hat at right, holding a dark bouquet; and a tiny figure at far left. Two more small figures stand at the river's edge further back.

Behind the field, a band of dark, blue-green bushes and tall poplars runs along the left, and a strip of river glints in the middle distance. Across the water, Vétheuil rises up the hillside, a jumble of pale houses and roofs dominated by the tall tower of the church of Notre-Dame. Wooded hills roll away to the right. The sky is a broad, active field of gray, white and pale blue clouds, painted in short choppy strokes.

Vétheuil, 1878–81

Monet moved to Vétheuil in 1878 with Camille, their two sons and the family of Ernest and Alice Hoschedé, after Hoschedé's bankruptcy. Money was short and Camille was seriously ill; she died in September 1879. Monet's Vétheuil pictures from these years include the bleak winter scenes of 1879–80 and, in contrast, bright summer views of the village from across the river. This canvas looks from the Lavacourt side of the Seine, in the commune of Moisson, toward Vétheuil.

The figures are not identified, but they are often thought to be from the household, Alice Hoschedé or Camille with the children. Related views include Vétheuil in Summer and View of Vétheuil at the Met, and The Church in Vétheuil in Winter. The poppy-field motif goes back to Monet's famous Poppies at Argenteuil of 1873. The whole period is covered on Monet at Vétheuil.

How it was painted

The canvas measures 73 by 92 centimeters and was painted outdoors. Monet's touch here is short and lively. The poppies are single dabs of thick red, the grasses quick vertical strokes, and the sky is laid down in small, overlapping patches that make it seem to move. The village is drawn more firmly, with the vertical of the church tower giving the composition a fixed point. Red against green, the strongest complementary pair, runs through the whole lower half.

Ownership, theft and where to see it

The painting passed through Paul Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune and Paul Cassirer. In the 1920s and 1930s it belonged to Max Emden, a Jewish department-store owner who lived on the Brissago Islands in Switzerland. After his death, his son and heir sold it in 1940–41, through the dealer Fritz Nathan, to the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Georg Bührle. The circumstances of that sale, made by a refugee under financial pressure, have been widely discussed in the debate over the Bührle collection's provenance.

On 10 February 2008 the painting was stolen from the Bührle Foundation in an armed robbery along with three other works, including a Van Gogh. It was found a few days later in a parked car. Since 2021 the foundation's paintings have been shown at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where this is one of the Monet works on view. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.