Belonging to one of the greatest series of his career, Monet's Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, temps couvert stands among the finest depictions of the tree-lined banks of the river Epte. Executed beginning in the spring of 1891, the remarkable series of twenty four works stands at the crux of Monet's acclaimed oeuvre, painted just after the iconic Meules series of 1890-91 and presaging the radical views of his London pictures, and ultimately, his defining Nymphéas.
Monet's paintings executed in the Eure during the late 1880s and early 1890s offer a vision of pastoral contentment; the fecundity of France and its vibrant seasons are portrayed in the most advanced Impressionist style. Discussing the artist’s daily routine at his home, Claire Joyes wrote: “The landscape at Giverny fascinated him. He spent a long while exploring, walking over hills and through valleys, in marshes and meadows, among streams and poplars. Or, drifting down the quiet river in his boat he would watch with a hunter’s concentration for the precise moment when light shimmered on grass or on silver willow leaves or on the surface of the water. Suddenly or by degrees his motif would be revealed to him” (Claire Joyes, Monet at Giverny, London, 1975, p. 20). Once settled on a subject Monet would rise early, breakfast lavishly, and set out across the fields with his canvases and painting paraphernalia in a wheelbarrow, often accompanied by an “assistant” in form of his step daughter Blanche Hoschedé.
“Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”
Progress was only interrupted by lunch—taken punctiliously at twelve o’clock—or a drastic change in weather. Monet was devoted to painting en plein air and the brilliant acuity of his observations of light and shade drawn directly from nature was matched only by the sublime harmony of his compositions. Gustave Geffroy, who became well-acquainted with the artist in the 1880s, wrote about Monet’s working methods: “All haste as he fills the canvas with the dominant tones, he then studies their graduations and contrast and harmonises them. From this comes the painting’s unity… Observe… all these different states of nature… and you will see the mornings rise before you, afternoons grow radiant, and the darkness of evening descend” (quoted in Daniel Wildenstein, Monet or The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 2003, p. 234).
Monet delighted and despaired in finding new motifs and painterly devices. His newfound financial security encouraged his bold experimentation in both subject and style, and yet the disappointment of some works led him to burn pyres of failed canvases—to the horror of his family and supporters. However, Monet’s pursuit of challenging subjects during this period has been characterized and justified by Christofer Conrad as: “The agonizing confrontation with the motif and that struggle to find the right response to the atmospheric moment produced paintings of magical lightness and an intrinsic poetic quality that far surpasses straight depiction of nature” (Christofer Conrad in Exh. Cat., Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Claude Monet. Fields in Spring, 2006, p. 79).
“When I saw Monet... I sensed a study so precise... It was a change that was becoming apparent, a new way of seeing, feeling and expression: a revolution."
Right: Fig. 2 Claude Monet, Antibes vue de la Salis, 1888, sold: Sotheby's, New York, 16 November 2021 for $13,342,400.
In the 1880s, Monet favored dramatic landscapes and coastal scenes. Monet’s depictions of the rugged, harsh beauties of the Belle-Île and effervescent sweetness of Antibes represent the breadth of his interpretive talents (see figs. 1-2). However, at the start of the following decade he sought more subtle and exacting natural phenomena to paint. So familiar to him was the land surrounding his home, that even the most common-place motifs were used to experiment on the fundamentals of painting. The freedom of Giverny’s landscape elicited some of Monet’s most accomplished works, not least the twenty-five canvases from the 1890-91 series of Meules (see fig. 3), the series of twenty-four Peupliers of 1891 and later the canvases of poppy fields. In these the artist immortalized the most ephemeral and exquisite qualities of light, using such quotidian motifs to such transcendently beautiful effects.
Monet's Peupliers in Museum Collections
In the Spring of 1891, Monet began a group of twenty-four paintings of a group of poplars located two kilometers from his house in Giverny. The poplars lined the banks of the Epte in the nearby village of Limetz. As it happened, not long after Monet began to paint them, the town of Limetz decided to auction off the trees. They had been planted as a cash crop on property belonging to the town, and in the summer of 1891 they were ready to be harvested. Monet’s request to the town elders to delay their sale was turned down so he turned to the owner of the saw mill. As he relayed the story years later to René Gimpel he asked “what price he [the saw mill owner] was going to buy them for. ‘Go higher’ he said to the timber merchant. ‘I’ll pay the difference but let me have time to paint them” (René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, New York, 1987, p. 314).
"Observe… all these different states of nature… and you will see the mornings rise before you, afternoons grow radiant, and the darkness of evening descend.”
Monet’s particular requirements regarding time of day, light and weather, led to the artist modifying and actively painting multiple canvases each day. Writing about Monet’s working methods in 1890 Georges Clemenceau observed: “When I saw Monet standing in front of his poppy field with his four canvases, changing palette to match the path taken by the sun, I sensed a study so precise in the use of light that the subject—assumed to be unchanging—pointed all the more strongly to the movement of light. It was a change that was becoming apparent, a new way of seeing, feeling and expression: a revolution… The Grainstacks and Poplars followed” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Paris, Grand Palais, Claude Monet 1840-1926, 2010-11, p. 262).
The Meules had allowed Monet to focus on changes in light and season in a primarily horizontal format, from bright summer sun to the muted tones of winter with the stacks covered in dustings of snow. The line of poplars, however, led to an entirely different format where the soaring trunks of the fast-growing trees springing from the banks of the river Epte required a vertical composition. In these canvases, sky, earth and water seamlessly meet, mirror and reflect as the line of trees wends its way through the scene. Paul Hayes Tucker discusses the particular appeal of the Peuplier series, writing:
“It is the beauty of the countryside, of course, which Monet emphasizes the most in these pictures, as many of the canvases are bathed in fresh, radiant light and are filled with bold colors that are applied with remarkable gusto. Unlike the staid and solid wheatstacks, the trees appear lithe and limber throughout the series. And instead of sitting immutably on the land like their conical counterparts, they move through their scenes in a seductive but stately fashion, often swaying to a kind of internal rhythm, their foliage rustled by an evident wind. For most of the canvases, Monet heightens these aspects of the series by assuming a low vantage-point, probably form the little bateau atelier that he had had built during his years at Argenteuil. He positioned his floating studio near where the river bent back on itself to form a reverse S-curve. This allowed him to stretch the trees and their reflections from the bottom of the canvas to the top and to counter that flexible grid with the slow sweep of the trees beyond as they curve right and then left before disappearing in the distance.”
Decades earlier Monet, and many of his colleagues, had become fascinated by Japanese woodblock prints. While his paintings maintained their fully worked and often thickly applied surface complete with subtle gradations of color and shadow he “admired the bold, unmodulated color of 18th and 19th century Japanese woodblock prints…. He was also intrigued by their inventive compositions, relative flatness, and lack of chiaroscuro modeling, and appreciated the fact that their subject matter was drawn from everyday life in Japan. So enthused was Monet with these prints that he collected them avidly. By 1890, his house in Giverny was a testimony to his passion. His collection of Japanese printed filled every room that did not contain his own paintings or works by his friends…. During June 1891, when he was in the middle of painting his Poplars, he invited a Japanese horticulturist to Giverny. Four days after the visit, according to Theodore Butler, ‘the master was completely occupied planting flowers… from all over the world.’ From the 1860s onward, Monet often incorporated formal elements of Japanese art or actual Japanese artifacts in his own paintings… The Poplars continue this dialogue as they recall prints such as Hiroshige’s Namazu, Yellow Dusk, which Théodore Duret even claimed was the inspiration for the series” (Exh. Cat., Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Monet in the 90s, The Series Paintings, 1989, p.125; see fig. 4).
The provenance of the present work exemplifies the important role Monet’s early collectors and dealers played in the promotion of his work, especially in America. Comfortably the richest couple in Chicago at the time, Bertha and Potter Palmer were not averse to spending their prodigious wealth; one headline of the Chicago Sunday Tribune asked “Is Mrs. Potter Palmer the only American Woman who knows how to spend a fortune?” From 1891 to 1892, Potter Palmer and his wife Bertha acquired a staggering amount of Impressionist art, primarily from the dealers Durand-Ruel in Paris and Knoedler in New York. Bertha was the driving force behind the collection, and intriguingly seems to have operated almost in the manner of a dealer, buying and selling works of art after owning them for a relatively short period of time. In the end, the Palmers had owned ninety paintings by Monet alone (see fig. 5), including eight works from the Meules series of 1890-91, a great number of which were bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. Their act of generosity helped to establish the museum as one of the greatest collections of Impressionist art in America.
Among the twenty-three surviving works in the Peupliers series, the present work is one of the most lyrical examples, its cottony lilac-blue skies contrasted by brilliant gem-like hues of green. Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, temps couvert belongs to the smaller subset of works within the series which are painted in a squarer format, the broader canvas allowing for the sweeping serpentine curves of the line of poplar trees. The nearly-square format of Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, temps couvert also presages the aritst's famed Nymphéas series, some of the earliest of which are executed on the same scale (see fig. 6).
Today, nearly half the works from Monet's Peupliers series are held in museum collections, with the present work among the finest remaining in private hands. Held in the same collection for over thirty years, Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, temps couvert comes to auction for the first time in nearly six decades.