Under the Poplars

Under the Poplars from 1887 at Museum Barberini in Potsdam explores the poplar subject from within the tree line rather than from across the river — a compositional variant that gave Monet a different spatial relationship to the same trees he would later paint as reflections in the Epte. Looking up into or along a poplar avenue, the vertical trunks creating a rhythmic colonnade, was a compositional type with long precedent in European landscape painting — the avenue paintings of the Dutch tradition, the Fontainebleau forest road studies Monet had made in the 1860s — but his application of the Impressionist atmospheric approach transformed the conventional subject. The filtering of light through the poplar canopy, the dappled quality of the illumination within the grove, and the strong rhythmic verticals of the trunks gave him formal material that he would elaborate more formally in the 1891 Poplars series. Museum Barberini holds this and other Monet works that together constitute an important survey of his development through the 1880s.

Monet builds the under-poplar view through the rhythmic pattern of vertical trunks and the light filtering through the canopy above. His handling varies between the tree trunks' solid vertical masses and the more fluid treatment of the light-filled foliage. The spatial recession along the line of poplars creates depth through the diminishing scale of the tree spacing and the atmospheric softening of the more distant trees.