Tulip Fields in Holland

What you are looking at

Bands of color run across a flat landscape toward a low horizon: a field of red tulips in the foreground, then strips of yellow, white, pink and green. In the middle distance stands a windmill, its sails angled against the sky, with a little shed at its foot and a dark cart beside it. To the right is a farmhouse with a red roof and a tall chimney, half screened by a tree. Above, half the canvas is sky, blue with big, bright cumulus clouds piled up by a spring wind.

The red field in the lower left is painted in rows of short strokes that converge, so the stripes of flowers seem to rush away from us toward the mill. Far off at the left, a thin line of buildings marks a distant town on the horizon.

Holland, spring 1886

Claude Monet had painted in Holland once before, at Zaandam in 1871, when he made pictures such as Zaandam and Windmill and Boats near Zaandam. In late April 1886 he went back at the invitation of the diplomat Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, then posted at the French legation in The Hague, who wanted him to see the bulb fields in bloom between Leiden and Haarlem. Monet stayed only about two weeks and painted five canvases.

He found the subject thrilling and maddening at once. He wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel that the fields were admirable but enough to drive a poor painter mad, impossible to render with the colors on his palette. That remark is the best guide to the picture: it is a struggle with color that refuses to be tamed.

How it was painted

Monet faced a real problem: tulip fields are blocks of pure, flat color, which can look crude in paint. He solves it by breaking every field into strokes of several hues. The red field contains pink, orange and dark crimson; the white field has touches of yellow and green; the yellow band is warmed with ocher. Each strip vibrates rather than sitting flat, and between the strips run thin green paths and ditches that separate one color from the next.

The windmill is painted quickly in gray and brown, almost in silhouette, its sails a few strokes. The clouds are built up thickly in creamy white with blue showing between them, and their brightness balances the heavy color below. With the horizon set close to halfway up, earth and sky get roughly equal weight, a classic Dutch arrangement that Monet would have known from seventeenth-century landscapes.

Dutch bulb growers often cut the flower heads off to strengthen the bulbs, heaping the petals by the ditches, so the colorful moment Monet caught was brief. He painted fast, and the paint is laid wet into wet with few corrections.

The five tulip pictures

Besides this one (W.1067), three of the five are in public collections: Tulip Fields near The Hague (W.1068) at the Van Gogh Museum, on loan from the Dutch state; a smaller tulip field (W.1069) at the Musée Marmottan Monet; and Tulip Fields at Sassenheim (W.1070) at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Our guide to where to see Monet lists those museums and their other holdings. The Orsay picture is the most panoramic, with the most sky, and the only one that puts a farmhouse and a mill side by side as a little rural story.

The fields were a flower subject on an industrial scale, and they point ahead to the cultivated color of Monet's own garden at Giverny, which he was planting in the same years. Compare Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny of 1887 and the poppies of A Field of Poppies.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1944 19). It is one of the Monets described on our Monet at the Musée d'Orsay page.