Under the Poplars

Under the Poplars (Sous les peupliers) is a summer landscape Claude Monet painted in 1887 on the plain of Les Essarts, between the Epte and the Seine near his home at Giverny. Signed and dated Claude Monet 87 at the lower left, it measures 73 by 92 centimeters. It belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection and is shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

What you're looking at

A field of grass and flowers fills the lower third of the canvas, glowing yellow and cream in the sun, with dense scatters of red poppies, especially on the left, and touches of white, pink and green. Two figures walk through it near the center. The taller one, a young woman in a long pale dress and a wide hat, faces away from us; the smaller one, to her left, is a child in dark clothing. The museum identifies the young woman as Germaine Hoschedé, daughter of Alice Hoschedé, whom Monet married in 1892, and the child as probably one of Monet's sons, Jean-Pierre or Michel.

Behind them rises the subject of the picture: a stand of young poplars on the right, their thin trunks gray and brown, their crowns light and feathery, painted in quick flicks of blue, green and yellow-green against the sky. To the left, the trees thin out: a single rounded tree, then two very tall, narrow poplars, and smaller ones in the distance. Along the horizon runs a low band of pale violet hills. The sky is a soft, hazy blue-white, brushed in long, smooth strokes.

The light is high summer, slightly veiled, and the whole picture is pale and airy.

Giverny, 1887

Monet had moved to Giverny in 1883 and spent his first years there painting the surrounding farmland, the river and the people of his household. The Barberini notes that the rows of poplars on the plain were among his favorite early Giverny motifs, and that he recorded how the landscape changed with the seasons. Monet painted the same two figures again in a closely related picture in Stuttgart, Poplars in the Sun. Other pictures of the same summers include Poplars at Giverny and the Orsay's The Boat at Giverny, with the Hoschedé daughters on the Epte.

How it was painted

The handling is free and spontaneous, the paint thick in the field and the trees. The meadow is built of small dabs of pure color, yellow, white, green and red, laid side by side. The poplars' foliage is flicked on in short strokes of blue and green that let the sky show through, giving the crowns their lightness. The vertical trunks set up a rhythm across the canvas that holds together field, figures and sky.

Before the Poplars series

Four years later, in 1891, Monet would paint a single line of poplars on the banks of the Epte more than twenty times, in the Poplars series: Wind Effect, Row of Poplars at the Orsay is one of them. Under the Poplars shows the trees still as part of a landscape with figures, rather than as the sole motif.

Provenance and where to see it

The painting belonged to Potter and Bertha Palmer in Chicago, and entered the Art Institute of Chicago from Bertha Palmer's estate in 1922. The Art Institute sold it at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1944, to Thomas J. Watson. It was later in Swiss and American private collections and was sold at Sotheby's, New York, in November 2014. It now hangs in the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, among the Impressionist paintings of the Hasso Plattner Collection, which includes dozens of works by Monet. See also Monet's Giverny and where to see Monet's paintings.