Willows at Giverny

What you are looking at

A row of pollarded willows stands across the canvas, their thick, knobbly trunks cut back to stumps from which thin, straight branches shoot upward. The branches thin out at the top into a haze of gold, cream and pale yellow leaves that fills the upper half of the picture. Between the trunks, a deeper band of blue and violet suggests more trees, or the river, in the distance. On the ground, long blue-violet shadows stretch across a meadow flecked with orange, green and gold. Everything is soft and slightly veiled, as if seen through mist or against a low sun.

The signature, "Claude Monet," appears in dark red at the lower right. The season is hard to fix: the yellow foliage and orange ground suggest autumn, the thin new shoots spring, and Monet seems content to leave it open.

Giverny, 1886

Claude Monet moved to Giverny, a village where the Epte meets the Seine in Normandy, in April 1883. The meadows near his house were lined with willows and poplars along the streams, and in the early years he painted them often, before the water garden absorbed him. This canvas, catalogued by Wildenstein as W.1059 and also known in English as Willows in Haze, Giverny, dates from 1886, the year he also went to Holland and to Belle-Île. The village and its surroundings are covered on Giverny.

Pollarding, cutting a tree back to the trunk so it sends up a crown of new shoots, was a common practice along rivers in northern France, producing willow rods for baskets and fencing. The trees' strange shapes, with swollen heads and bristling branches, appealed to painters from Monet to Van Gogh.

How it was painted

This is a painting about light against the eye. The low sun appears to be behind the trees, so the foliage glows and the trunks and shadows go blue. Monet makes the shadows as important as the trees: look at how they fall toward us in long diagonal bands of ultramarine and violet, laid over a warm orange ground.

The trunks are painted with dark, twisting strokes of gray, brown and blue; the branches are single thin lines of purple and brown that rise and then disappear into the haze. Notice that he leaves no clear sky anywhere. The upper half is a field of short, dabbed strokes in yellow, cream and blue, which can be read as leaves, sky and mist all at once.

The paint is dry and dragged, so the weave of the canvas catches the color and breaks it into specks. That broken surface is part of the effect: up close it is almost grainy, but from a few steps away it shimmers like light seen through moisture in the air. The hazy, unified tonality looks ahead to the misty mornings Monet would paint on the Seine near Giverny a decade later.

The willows are spaced almost evenly, like columns, and cut off at the top by the frame. That rhythm of verticals across a horizontal field is the same device Monet would use, five years later, in the Poplars series on the Epte, for instance Poplars on the Banks of the River Epte.

Giverny's trees and how this picture differs

In the late 1880s Monet painted the meadows around Giverny in many effects: the open grass of Meadow at Giverny, the stacks of Haystack at Giverny, the poppy fields. This canvas is the most atmospheric of that group. The forms are barely there, and the subject is the colored haze in which they stand.

It looks ahead, too, to the weeping willows of his last years, such as Weeping Willow of 1920–22, where a single tree again becomes a vehicle for color.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden (GKM 1509), one of the strongest collections of French painting in Scandinavia. For other museums with Monet's Giverny landscapes, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.