Meadow at Giverny

Painted in 1886 after Monet had established his home at Giverny, this view of the surrounding meadows shows his attention to the lush, humid character of the Norman countryside in summer. The year 1886 was exploratory — he was also painting in Belle-Île in Brittany and beginning to think in terms of serial motif study. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston version records the open, undulating quality of the landscape immediately around his new home, a terrain he would mine throughout the rest of his career for its shifting atmospheric effects as seasons and weather transformed the same fields endlessly.

Short, commalike brushstrokes in varied greens and yellows evoke the movement of grass in breeze, a characteristic Monet technique from the mid-1880s. The upper third of the canvas — sky with light clouds — is handled more smoothly, creating a tonal contrast between the active foreground meadow and the quieter aerial zone above.