Poplars at Giverny

Poplars at Giverny from 1887 at Museum Barberini in Potsdam belongs to the early phase of Monet's investigation of the poplar trees along the Epte River that would become the formal Poplars series of 1891. The 1887 canvases are studies rather than serial paintings — informal investigations of the same trees he would later paint with systematic serial rigor — and they demonstrate his gradual accumulation of visual knowledge before committing to a formal project. The tall, straight poplars of the Epte bank offered an extraordinary formal subject: their perfect vertical rhythm, the variation between summer and autumn foliage, and their flawless reflections in the still river water creating a motif that combined Impressionist observation with the decorative sensibility he had absorbed from Japanese woodblock prints. By 1887 Monet's collection of Japanese prints numbered in the hundreds, and the poplar reflections he was beginning to investigate had clear formal echoes in the vertical landscape prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai. Museum Barberini holds this early poplar study alongside other Monet works that together trace the development of his serial thinking.

Monet builds the poplar composition through the interaction of vertical tree forms above and their reflections below — the river's mirror surface doubling the sky through the horizontal water band. His brushwork differentiates the sky's atmospheric softness from the trees' structural masses, and the water's reflective surface from the river bank's solid matter. The palette is typically airy and light-saturated for this summer subject.