Meadows at Giverny

Painted in 1888 and now in the Hermitage Museum, Meadows at Giverny belongs to a period when Monet was intensifying his scrutiny of the Norman landscape immediately surrounding his newly established home. The open meadows between Giverny and the Seine provided uncomplicated visual material — sky, grass, poplar trees — whose very simplicity forced him to isolate pure optical sensation as the painting's subject rather than any anecdotal content. The 1888 canvases from this terrain show him moving steadily toward the serial approach that would define his mature work from 1890 onward.

The canvas demonstrates Monet's characteristic 1880s brushwork: short, individually distinct strokes laid at varying angles to create a woven textural surface that unifies foreground grass, middle-distance meadow, and sky through a consistent visual tempo. Warm yellows and cool greens are juxtaposed without blending across the meadow floor.