Giverny Landscape

Giverny Landscape (1887) at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City depicts the countryside surrounding Monet's garden property in the mid-1880s, shortly after he had settled permanently at Giverny in 1883. The rural agricultural landscape of the Epte valley and the meadows between Giverny and Vernon provided Monet with a new range of local motifs to explore systematically after leaving the Seine valley at Vétheuil. This canvas preceded the great series paintings of 1890s by a few years, showing Monet developing his understanding of the Giverny landscape before focusing it into the intense serial approach of the Haystacks and Poplars campaigns.

Rolling Norman hills and meadows are handled with broad, confident strokes in summer greens and warm ochres. The composition is relatively open with a high horizon and substantial sky. Monet's palette here has the varied, exploratory quality typical of his mid-1880s landscape work.