Obsessed with this view, Monet paid the owner of the trees not to cut them down until he finished his paintings.
Claude Monet, Poplars, 1891, oil on canvas, 93 x 74.1 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] According to a friend, Monet sometimes only had seven minutes to work on a single canvas before the light changed too much and the effect that he was looking for was gone.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:15] This meant that he had to return day after day to catch that exact moment of light.
Dr. Zucker: [0:20] This really speaks to Monet’s hypersensitivity to specific effects of light, and especially in the early [18]’90s when he was working on his “Haystacks” and on this “Poplars” series. Monet is representing poplar trees near his house. He apparently painted these from a small rowboat.
Dr. Harris: [0:38] The rowboat was fitted especially with slats in the bottom so that he could bring many canvases along with him.
Dr. Zucker: [0:44] That’s exactly how he worked. In the paintings of Rouen, in the paintings of the haystacks, in the “Poplars” series, Monet would paint on a series of canvases as the effects of light would change as the sun moved across the sky.
[0:55] He wasn’t depicting what he knew of the poplar, the specificity of its leaf, what he knew of its bark. Instead, the atmosphere and the sun’s light contributed to the form before him, so that would shift radically as the day progressed.
Dr. Harris: [1:09] This is something that interested Monet from the very beginning of his career, the optical experience at any given moment and being incredibly attuned to it, working to forget what he knew. Instead of trees, meadow, river, sky, these became shapes and colors.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] You have these three elegant poplars. They raise up, but their canopies are hidden from us above the frame. Below, we see the ground [with] its own reflection and the poplars reflected below that.
[1:42] My favorite part is the whiplash of the canopy of the trees in the background that have become so abstract it takes a moment for us to recognize what they really are.
Dr. Harris: [1:50] Well and they’re pink…
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] Yes, they are.
Dr. Harris: [1:52] …and their reflections are pink. Trees are not pink, but on this windy autumn day, with bright sunlight, that’s how they appeared to Monet.
[2:02] I think it’s really interesting to think about him on his boat in the river and finding views of these poplar trees that he found very beautiful. I can see why this view in particular appealed to him, with that lovely arabesque that you referred to.
Dr. Zucker: [2:17] Soon after Monet had begun the series, he found out that the man who owned this land had actually sold these trees to be cut down for wood. Monet paid the man who had bought them to hold off until the fall so he could finish his series.
Dr. Harris: [2:29] That’s also really characteristic of Monet. He wants to paint something out in nature, things happen, and he somehow stops the change. Because he’s painting such a short moment of the light, he has to be able to paint it over a considerable amount of time and make sure the scene remains that way.
Dr. Zucker: [2:47] Look at the surface. This is built-up paint. This is not something that he did in a flash, so there’s a really interesting conflict between the heavily worked surface and his promise to us that this is the momentary.
Dr. Harris: [2:58] So there’s a real problem here.
Dr. Zucker: [3:01] Yeah, the surface is impasto. It’s built up. It’s heavy. You can see not only the paint strokes but the strokes over the strokes. This is characteristic not only of this canvas of the poplars but of the entire series; in fact, of Monet’s series in general.
[3:13] Think about his haystacks, his images of Rouen Cathedral, the “Water Lilies.” These are paintings that represent the momentary but have been built up over time.
Dr. Harris: [3:22] What I find lovely about these late series paintings is a sense of poignancy, of a moment in time that exists only very briefly. We see through his eyes.
Dr. Zucker: [3:34] I guess what I find astonishing is the intensity of the abstraction. This is a painting from the 1890s, and it seems to me to anticipate the work of the 20th century.
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