1885, Claude Monet, Field of Poppies, Giverny -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
In April 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, a rural farming village in Normandy, and lived out the rest of his life there in a pink stucco house called Le Pressoir. Setting up his easel in a field that afforded a view of his house and the colorful expanse of an adjacent poppy field, Monet completed four paintings of this view that summer, including Field of Poppies, Giverny. The painter achieved a tranquil atmosphere and compositional harmony by dividing the foreground, middle ground, and background of the painting into three equal horizontal segments. He rendered the field and sky with a repetitive application of separate brushstrokes like those that characterized his earliest expressionist experiments. A more complex application of paint constitutes the central band of the scene, and the clever introduction of a streak of blue across the horizon line accomplishes the effect of a receding perspective.
The painting received widespread recognition in the United States when it was shown at the exhibition Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris in 1886. Alden Weyman Kingman purchased the landscape, making it one of Monet's first works to be acquired by an American collector.
1885, Claude Monet, Field of Poppies, Giverny -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
In April 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, a rural farming village in Normandy, and lived out the rest of his life there in a pink stucco house called Le Pressoir. Setting up his easel in a field that afforded a view of his house and the colorful expanse of an adjacent poppy field, Monet completed four paintings of this view that summer, including Field of Poppies, Giverny. The painter achieved a tranquil atmosphere and compositional harmony by dividing the foreground, middle ground, and background of the painting into three equal horizontal segments. He rendered the field and sky with a repetitive application of separate brushstrokes like those that characterized his earliest expressionist experiments. A more complex application of paint constitutes the central band of the scene, and the clever introduction of a streak of blue across the horizon line accomplishes the effect of a receding perspective.
The painting received widespread recognition in the United States when it was shown at the exhibition Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris in 1886. Alden Weyman Kingman purchased the landscape, making it one of Monet's first works to be acquired by an American collector.