Painting Detail
Poppy FieldArtist: Claude Monet
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 60.5x92 cm
Date: c. 1890
Genre: Landscape
Source: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, 1948
Monet had a house at Giverny, where this painting and many of his famous landscape series were produced. There is a whole group of canvases which take as their motif a field of poppies.
Attracted by the vision of the fluttering, rippling colours of the moving carpet of flowers, the artist had already turned to this theme. In the Hermitage canvas he concentrates all his attention of conveying an impression of the massy surface swept sideways by the wind, and totally rejects any attempt to depict details. The modesty of the motif, which is characteristic of most of Monet's works, in no ways detracts from its poetry and the feeling that nature herself breathes within the picture.