Poppy Field by Claude Monet

Poppy Field by Claude Monet

Two figures, twice

Monet was living at Argenteuil, on the Seine north-west of Paris, when he painted this field in 1873. A broad diagonal of poppies runs down the slope from the upper left; the rest of the field is soft greys and greens, with a row of trees and a pink-roofed house on the horizon and a large, cloudy sky above. The woman with the blue parasol and the child in the foreground are usually identified as Camille Monet and their son Jean. The pair near the top of the slope seem to be the same two figures again, so that the picture reads as a single walk down the hill.

Paint before flowers

Look closely and the poppies are not drawn at all. They are dabs of red paint set down on top of the green, some of them far too large for their distance from us, and they hold together as a field only when you step back. The picture was among the works Monet showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874, alongside Impression, Sunrise.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and measures 50 by 65 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 5,586-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 37 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée d’Orsay, Paris · Wikidata Q3231771 · Wikimedia Commons