Claude Monet
Poppies near Vétheuil
Oil on canvas. 71.5 x 90.5 cm.
Claude Monet. Painted around 1880
There is a decade between the "Supper" and the "Poppies near Vétheuil", filled with both successes and
disappointments. It includes the actual birth of Impressionism, involuntarily furnished with a label by Monet with his
picture title "Impression, Sunrise" at the first exhibition of the group in 1874, In the summer of the same year these
artists collaborated in an unprecedented way in Argenteuil, and this resulted in the definitive emergence of open-air
painting. At the same time these painters were plunged in ever more unbearable distress – owing to a general economic
crisis in France after the defeat in war.
This was not the least reason why Monet increasingly detached himself from Paris and in January 1878 settled in the village
of Vétheuil on the right bank of the Seine, to remain there till the end of 1881. He could not thus remedy his distress –
increased by the death of Camille, his wife, but life there was at least cheap, and he found many subjects in Vétheuil as in
Lavacourt on the other side of the Seine. In Argenteuil he had first painted on a boat to catch all the brilliant glitter on
the water, and he continued to do this in Vétheuil.
But he did not paint Vétheuil from the river or from the opposite bank, as has been falsely assumed, but he sets up his easel
in the flowering meadows of the Vienne, where the children pick poppies, with a view of the church between the gentle hills.
Monet no longer paints this under the influence of Manet, but with a dense texture of spots of colour finely applied, which
melts objects and makes the atmosphere the actual theme. We are close to Seurat’s "Pointillisme". In 1901 Monet again painted
in Vétheuil, doing six views exhibited in 1902.
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