Poplars

Poplars (1883) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek belongs to Gauguin's Normandy and Île-de-France landscape production in the early years of his full-time painting career. The poplar tree had become one of the most distinctly French of landscape subjects — the planted rows along Norman roads and riverbanks were among the most recognized features of the French countryside — and Monet's serial poplar paintings of 1891 would make the subject internationally famous. Gauguin's 1883 version preceded Monet's series by eight years and belonged to the Impressionist engagement with the poplar's formal properties: its strong vertical rhythm, its light, fluttering foliage, and the way rows of poplars organized the landscape space into clear vertical-horizontal architectures. The Glyptotek's 1883 Poplars alongside the 1882 Landscape Study, the 1875 Landscape from Viroflay, and the 1878 Sailing Vessel gives Copenhagen one of the densest concentrations of early Gauguin available anywhere.

The poplar forms are rendered as tapering vertical presences against the sky. The horizontal landscape below provides a stable ground plane. Foliage is handled with Impressionist broken colour in the greens and golds appropriate to summer or autumn poplars. The composition relies on the formal rhythm of the tree row for its primary organisational structure.