Three Poplars, Summer

What you are looking at

Three slender poplar trunks rise from the bottom of the canvas to the top and beyond, cut off by the frame so we never see their crowns. Behind them a band of smaller trees, their leaves yellow, gold and green in strong sunlight, curves away along the riverbank. Above, a deep blue sky is filled with swirling white clouds. Below, the river Epte reflects the whole scene upside down in broken strokes, the trunks continuing as wavering lines into the water.

Claude Monet painted this canvas in 1891, during the summer he devoted to a row of poplars on the Epte, a short distance upstream from his home at Giverny. It is in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which catalogues it as Poplars in the Sun; the descriptive title Three Poplars, Summer is also widely used. It measures about 93 by 73.5 centimeters and is signed at lower right.

Looking closely

The picture is organized around a grid. The three vertical trunks, evenly spaced, divide the canvas into panels like the uprights of a screen. The horizontal band of the riverbank, a ribbon of bright green, crosses them about two-thirds of the way down. Above and below that line, sky and reflection mirror each other.

Monet treats the trunks themselves as colored lines rather than solid objects. They are pinkish-orange and ochre where the sun strikes, with clumps of green leaves clinging along their length (poplars in this region were often pruned so that foliage grew close to the trunk). The color of the bark is set against the blue of the sky, a pairing of warm and cool that makes the trees seem to vibrate.

The clouds are laid in with loose, curving strokes of white and grey over blue, quite different from the short dabs used for the foliage. In the water the brushwork changes again: horizontal strokes break the reflections into bands of blue, orange and gold, so the river feels both still and alive. Notice how the reflected trunks are offset slightly, as they would be in moving water, and how the band of riverbank is painted in quick, upward flicks of green, the grasses catching the same sun as the leaves. The signature, at lower right, is placed in the reflection, almost lost among the strokes.

The Poplars series

In the spring of 1891 Monet began painting a line of poplars along the Epte at Limetz, near Giverny. He worked largely from his studio boat, which let him look up at the trees from water level and gave the series its characteristic low, upward-looking viewpoint. The trees belonged to the local commune, and when they were put up for sale as timber before he had finished, Monet reached an arrangement with the buyer, paying to have the felling delayed until his paintings were done.

He produced more than twenty canvases of the motif, in three broad groups. Some, like this one, show a few trunks close up, cut off top and bottom; others show the whole line of trees zigzagging along the river; still others show the S-curve of the bank from further away. Fifteen were exhibited together at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in early 1892, a year after the Grainstacks had been shown there to great success.

Related canvases on this site include The Four Trees (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte and Poplars, Three Pink Trees, Autumn, a close cousin of this composition in autumn color.

What does the series mean?

Monet's series paintings were about time: the same motif under different light, season and weather. In the poplars he added a strong decorative structure, verticals and horizontals arranged almost like a woven textile or a folding screen, which many art historians link to Japanese prints and to the growing taste for decorative painting in the 1890s.

Some writers have also read the poplars as a patriotic motif. The poplar had been a symbol of liberty since the French Revolution, when "liberty trees" were planted across France, and the series appeared at a time of renewed national feeling. There is no statement from Monet to support this, and it is best treated as one possible reading of a motif he chose primarily for its light and form.

Where to see it

The painting is in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, part of the Matsukata Collection assembled in Europe in the early twentieth century by the industrialist Kojiro Matsukata. The museum was opened in 1959, designed by Le Corbusier, largely to house the part of that collection returned to Japan by France. It holds one of the finest groups of Monets in Asia. Check the museum's website for current display. For more, see our guide to famous Monet paintings.