The Four Trees

What you are looking at

Four straight, thin trunks rise from the bottom of a nearly square canvas and run right off the top edge. We never see the crowns of the trees, only their columns, tufted along their length with small clumps of blue-violet foliage. Behind them, a low band of riverbank vegetation in dark purple, plum and green crosses the canvas at mid-height, and beyond that, a second, more distant row of poplars curves away in an S-shape, glowing yellow, orange and pink in the autumn sun. Below, the still water of the river reflects everything: the four trunks continue downward as darker, softer columns, and the warm colors of the distant trees reappear as pale smears in the reflection.

The design is almost a grid. Four verticals, evenly but not quite regularly spaced, cross two horizontals, the bank and its reflection. The square format reinforces the geometry. What keeps it from being rigid is the color: the cool blues and violets of the near trunks against the hot oranges behind them, and the pale lavender and turquoise of the sky laid on in thousands of short, criss-crossing strokes. Monet signed and dated the canvas "Claude Monet 91" at lower left, in the reflection.

Spend a moment on the far trees. Their S-curve, glimpsed between the trunks, is the only movement in a picture otherwise made of straight lines, and it leads the eye back and forth across the surface like a ribbon.

The Poplars series

In the spring of 1891 Monet began painting a row of poplars along the river Epte at Limetz, a short way upstream from his home at Giverny. He worked from a flat-bottomed boat fitted out as a floating studio, moored in the river, which gave him the low viewpoint and the reflections. When the trees were put up for auction by the commune, before he had finished, Monet reportedly arranged with the timber merchant who bought them to pay for the felling to be delayed until his paintings were complete.

Over the following months he painted the trees more than twenty times, at different times of day and in different weather, in two main compositions: views looking along the curving row, like Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte and Poplars, Three Pink Trees, Autumn, and close-up views of a few trunks cut by the frame, like this one and Three Poplars, Summer. The Four Trees is one of the boldest of the close-ups.

Working this way meant racing the light. Monet kept several canvases on the go in the boat and switched between them as the sun moved. The American painter Lilla Cabot Perry, who knew him at Giverny, later recalled him saying that he had worked on one poplar effect for only seven minutes at a time, until the sunlight left a particular leaf, and then had to wait for the next day to continue. The dense, layered surface of The Four Trees, with stroke laid over stroke, records many such sessions as well as later work in the studio.

Fifteen of the Poplars paintings were shown together at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in February–March 1892, the first time Monet exhibited a series devoted to a single motif. They followed the success of his Grainstacks in 1891 and preceded the Rouen Cathedral façades, and they were a critical and commercial triumph.

Meaning: nature as decoration

Poplars were an everyday sight in French river valleys, planted for timber along banks and roads, and they had no grand associations. That was part of their appeal. Monet's subject is not the trees as such but the effect of light, the season and the pattern they make. Critics in 1892 already noticed how decorative the series was, close to the flat patterning of Japanese prints, which Monet collected and which often show trees cropped by the edge of the image. The historian Paul Hayes Tucker has also proposed a patriotic note: poplars were often planted as "liberty trees" after the French Revolution, and the word peuplier echoes peuple, the people. Monet himself never claimed such a meaning.

The Four Trees in particular points forward to abstraction. With its grid of verticals and horizontals and its all-over brushwork, it has been compared to the work of Piet Mondrian, who painted rows of trees in a similar way in the 1900s and 1910s on his path toward pure abstraction.

Where to see it

The Four Trees belongs to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It came to the museum in 1929 with the H. O. Havemeyer Collection, the bequest of Louisine Havemeyer, one of the great early American collectors of Impressionism. It hangs in the Met's galleries of nineteenth-century European painting when on view. See also famous Monet paintings.