Claude Monet

Michel Monet, Giverny
Etienne Bignou, Paris
Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
C.H.G. Millis, London (acquired circa 1967)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 15th April 1970, lot 17 
H. du Carrois, Zurich
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1981

Executed at the height of Monet’s Impressionism, Les Peupliers exemplifies the artist’s life-long commitment to painting en plein air, exploring the effects of weather conditions and light at different times of the day on the surrounding landscape. Painted in the plain of Les Essarts, this work depicts the green expanses not far from the artist’s home in Giverny, showing a row of colourful poplar trees in full blossom with the hills of Port-Villez visible in the background. Poplar trees appear in Monet’s art as early as 1858, rising elegantly in the background of Vue prise à Rouelles (G. Wildenstein, op. cit., no. 1), one of his earliest recorded paintings. Fascinated by their graceful appearance, Monet painted a number of views of poplar trees throughout the 1870s and 1880, moving this subject to the centre of his compositions, and emphasising their height and their command of the surrounding landscape.

Painted in 1890, Les Peupliers heralds Monet’s celebrated series of poplar paintings, executed in 1891 along the Epte river, just a few kilometers from his house. In contrast with the poplar series, in which the tall, elongated trees occupy the entire height of the canvas, in the present work the artist paid equal attention to the rich, colourful stretch of the green field in the foreground, a feature typical of the local landscape that he so admired. Writing about Monet’s paintings executed in 1890, Paul Hayes Tucker observed that ‘he concentrated primarily on subjects round his Giverny estate that suggested the bounties of the soil and the poetry of rural light. The largest number of pictures he produced were more than a dozen views of flowing fields of hay, oats, and poppies […], all of which are filled with the freshness of the day. Despite the lack of human figures, these pictures exude a sense of fullness’ (P. H. Tucker, Claude Monet. Life and Art, New Haven & London, 1995, p. 139).