Poplars, Éragny

Poplars, Éragny at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted in 1895, shows Pissarro engaging with the same tree type that Monet had made the subject of one of his most celebrated serial campaigns four years earlier. Monet's Poplars series of 1891 — twenty-three canvases of a row of poplars on the Epte river at Limetz, painted before the trees were felled — had established the poplar as an Impressionist icon and demonstrated the possibilities of the serial approach to a single motif across changing conditions. Pissarro's 1895 Éragny poplars come after Monet's series and engage with the subject differently: not as a serial investigation of the same view across conditions but as a single, direct observation of familiar trees in his own landscape. The Metropolitan Museum's Pissarro holdings, which span his career from the St. Thomas period to the late urban series, allow this late Éragny landscape to be read within the full context of his development and its relationship to the broader movement he had helped found.

The vertical thrust of poplar trunks against horizontal bands of field and sky creates a compositional tension that Pissarro exploits throughout the canvas. He renders the poplars' delicate, trembling foliage with rapid, upward strokes of varied greens, while the sky is handled with more sustained, horizontal paint to contrast with the trees' movement.