Following this revelation, a newspaper of the era, ‘La Gaulois’, wrongly published that Alice was his “charming wife” in 1880. In fact, Alice went on to marry Monet in 1892 after Ernest’s death. Monet and Alice grew close as well it is thought that her sixth child, Jean-Pierre, may have been fathered by Monet. Ernest was a useful figure for the artist to have around as he was a patron of Monet’s, collecting and commissioning his artwork for many years. Over time, the prettiness of the surrounding scenery helped him fully reclaim his passion for art and Impressionism. Due to his dwindling funds, Monet moved in with his friends Ernest and Alice Hoschedé and their five children, along with his own two sons mothered by Camille, Jean and Michel. The landscape was in fact Giverny, a quaint commune in the northerly region of Normandy.Īt Giverny, Monet decided to rent a house and gardens in the area.
On the horizon, he witnessed miles of picturesque scenery: steadfast temptation for any Impressionist. On a journey from Vernon to Gasny, Monet absent-mindedly watched the countryside speed by from his train window. This revelation, combined with his all-consuming grief, led Monet through a dark period wherein he expressed a wish to move away from art altogether. Instead, he found that modern times were moving away from the Impressionists. Soon after, in 1879, he travelled to Paris, hoping to generate a new wave of attention for his work. Whether using dusky darks or pastel hues, each installation of ‘Poplars’ is both analogous and unique to its neighbour.Īfter the tragic death of Monet’s first wife, Camille, the artist’s finances dropped dramatically. The cream of her dress is the only bright burst of pale paint throughout the whole of the ‘Poplars’ series, demonstrating how seriously Monet took colour-mixing. In another, a female figure is seen strolling through a golden field, holding a parasol aloft. In one image, shrubs bend, suggesting a blowing breeze. With the months bringing different weather conditions, this was all the more important to Monet’s practice. Monet himself described the mathematical quality of his canvases, stating “here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.”īy distributing different types of brushstrokes across the canvas, texture is defined within the piece. These marks indicate the transition from Impressionism into Post-Impression in Monet’s work: his speckled brushwork in these paintings formed the foundation for future painting styles, such as Pointillism.
At the poplars’ roots, vivid shades are streaked across the canvas, showing the movement of water as the river runs. Spots of green, grey and brown mediate the mass of leaves. The trunks of the trees are stretched out thinly, like a spine supporting the poplars’ columnar bodies. Then clouds appear as pearls in the sky, shaped using pasty daubs of paint. First, Monet applies a simplistic wash of colour, cementing a subdued backdrop. In the works, he employs animated mark-making with dots, dabs and dashes. In addition, Monet excludes white or black when interpreting highlights and lowlights, instead opting for a similar colour palette of pastels and warmer or cooler tones. With oscillating levels of sunshine, Monet uses colour to prescribe a sense of temperature in the Poplars series oranges are added to denote heat whilst murky blues symbolise cold. Working on location, Monet created compositions that complimented the lighting conditions available on the day he was painting. His ‘Poplars’ series is a continuation of his fascination with naturalistic scenes, painted ‘en plein-air’ with the archetypal Impressionistic technique. After adopting the Seine River as one of his main effigies, Monet pushed his work farther by focusing on the brooks and banks of these iconic watercourses.