Poplars View from the Marsh

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Poplars View from the Marsh: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - Poplars View from the Marsh

Keywords: Poplars, View, Marsh

Work Overview: Poplars, View from the Marsh
Claude Monet
Date: 1891 - 1892
Style: Impressionism
Genre: landscape
Oil on canvas
89 x 92 cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum

This is one of a series of canvases of poplars that Monet painted in the summer of 1891. Working from his rowing boat on the River Epte, two kilometres upstream of his home at Giverny, he painted the trees in different seasons and under a variety of weather conditions, concentrating on the sinuous patterns formed by the line of trees along the riverbank. Soon after beginning the series, Monet almost lost his motif, when the poplars were put up for sale by the village. However he came to a financial arrangement with the timber merchant who had bought them, which left the trees standing long enough for him to finish painting them. This is one of only two in the series to be seen from the marsh.

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Visitors sometimes stop and ask what my favourite gallery is, or which painting I would most like to own. The answer to the first question sometimes changes, but the second never does. Inevitably I pick Monet’s luminous Poplars of 1891. My choice isn’t particularly surprising, but the reasons behind it come from a moment many years ago.

When I was seventeen I went to Paris on a school trip with my French class. For most of us it was the first time crossing the Atlantic to see the cathedrals and museums we’d written essays on in imperfect French. Coping with jetlag, navigating the Metro one wrong train at a time and figuring out how to fit our massive suitcases into a tiny hotel room shared with two other teenage girls was hardly an auspicious start to two weeks in Europe.

But walking through the Tuileries on a June afternoon, the gardens drenched with sunlight, something clicked in my brain. The light was different here—suddenly all those Impressionist paintings we’d seen so many slides of made sense in a way they hadn’t before. In that moment, my whole understanding of art shifted. Trying to capture that light was made Impressionism, and Monet in particular, so remarkable.

Poplars is one of many pictures he painted around the River Epte. It’s a scene characteristic of the series: the curved line of trees that follow the bend of the river, the sky that changes colour imperceptibly from blue to white to lilac, the brilliant green leaves that seem lit from within. You can sit with it and no matter how dismal the weather outside, you feel lifted by it. Close-up it may just seem a mess of brushstrokes and daubs, but every one of them has as much intention as Poussin’s carefully controlled lines. If you’re willing to let your imagination go, this is a painting where you can almost feel Monet’s energy and deliberation.

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Claude Monet

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