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Lot Essay
Bathed in the intense pink hues of the setting sun, Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule is a masterful study of the dramatic play of light that transforms the landscape as day gives way to night. One of just four works from the artist’s acclaimed Peupliers series to specify a particular time of day in their titles, the composition appears through a richly worked network of vivid color, each layer of pigment and touch of the brush carefully chosen to convey the nuances and dynamism of the fading light, which Monet observed while working en plein air before his motif. Across this concentrated sequence of paintings focusing on the poplar tree, Monet embraces a bold, instinctive approach to facture and color that almost hovers on the edge of abstraction, offering a startlingly prescient vision of the landscape that anticipates many of the developments that transformed art-making through the twentieth century. Formerly owned by the pioneering Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel—in whose family it remained until 1955—the painting has been held in the same private collection for the past sixty-five years.
Across the group of two dozen works that make up the Peupliers series (Wildenstein, nos. 1291-1313), Monet focused on the slender, towering form of the poplar tree, an iconic and instantly recognizable element within the surrounding countryside. He had come across a picturesque stretch of these trees planted on the edge of the river Epte just a few kilometers from his home in Giverny during the spring of 1891, and spent much of the rest of the year studying their changing character under various atmospheric conditions. Each created from almost exactly the same vantage point, near a spot where the Epte bends back on itself twice to create a distinctive S-shape, the resulting compositions are a powerful showcase of the artist’s bourgeoning serial technique, which would come to define Monet’s output across the final three decades of his career.
A common feature within the French countryside during the nineteenth century, poplars were typically found lining the entrance routes to grand châteaux, or standing along rural roads as windshields for tilled fields, while land owners around the country planted them as a form of fencing to demarcate property boundaries. Lithe and elegant, they grew quickly—generally twenty-five to thirty feet in a decade—making them a popular investment for speculators, while their ability to quickly absorb large amounts of water made them a perfect addition to river banks as protection against flooding. Moreover, following the French Revolution, the poplar had become a symbol of liberty, largely due to its name, which derived from the Latin populus, meaning both “people” and “popular.” By 1793, sixty thousand poplars had been planted in France, and hundreds of broadsides were issued featuring the tree as a symbol of the new republic. Ceremonial plantings were common on important anniversaries, most notably in 1889 to mark the centenary of the Revolution, and the tree was seen as an emblem of the stability, beauty and fecundity of rural France within the public imagination.
Poplars had been a favorite motif of Monet’s since the beginnings of his painterly career—in one of his earliest known compositions, Vue prise à Rouelles (1858, Wildenstein, no. 1; Marunuma Art Park, Asaka) a bank of poplars occupies the center of the composition, their slender forms rising above the surrounding vegetation to draw the eye towards the middle distance. Similarly, the trees abound in a number of the artist’s views of Argenteuil and Vétheuil, while the sequence of paintings devoted to the verdant meadows that emerged following his move to Giverny in 1883 most often featured a row of regularly spaced poplars along the edge of the field. While they appear in the background of nearly half of the artist’s Meules paintings, it was not until his fortuitous discovery of the sweeping row of poplars along the Epte that Monet took the opportunity to focus on the slender silhouettes of these trees fully, bringing them in from the edge of the landscape to the foreground of his paintings, and granting them a new prominence and monumentality in the process.
Anchoring his view in the natural topography of the river, as it winds its way through the countryside, in these works Monet presents a dynamic view of the poplars along the water’s edge. Most of the series focuses on a screen of tall, slender poplars in the foreground, while behind, looping away along the river bank, the rest of the trees generate a striking arabesque pattern as they follow the water. In Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, rather than looking directly at the poplars, Monet turned slightly to the left to accentuate the sweeping, diagonal progression of the trees, generating a vivid sense of depth within the painting, as the eye follows their line from right to left and back again, before they disappear into the distance in a flurry of foliage. The lower portion of the canvas is devoted to the rippling surface of the water, filled with the reflections of the tree trunks, which seem to softly dematerialize before the eye, offering a striking contrast to the strong, upright forms of the poplars themselves.
The low vantage point, just slightly above the level of the water, suggests that the artist worked from the bateau atelier that he had built during his years at Argenteuil. This ingeniously modified, modest row boat allowed the artist to bring multiple canvases, painting supplies, and even an easel with him to his chosen site. Each morning, rather than walking from his home in Giverny, Monet was able to set off from his gardens, rowing directly to this section of the river via a tributary that ran through his property. Once he reached the poplars, he anchored the boat in the center of the river Epte and set to work. Looking up at the trees from the deck of the boat, Monet sought to capture an impression of their vertiginous profiles, accentuating the height and verticality of the trees by elongating the poplars and their reflections so that they filled the entire stretch of his canvas.
However, just as he was fully immersed in this intriguing new motif, Monet received word that the village of Limetz, which owned the trees along the Epte, intended to sell the bank of poplars at an upcoming auction. They had been planted on communal land as a cash crop, and by June 1891 had reached an appropriate height for harvest. The artist appealed directly to the local mayor to delay the sale, but to no avail, and in a letter of 28 July, Monet lamented that there remained “quantities of new canvases which I must finish” (quoted in J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven, 1986, p. 201). It was only on the day of the auction itself that he came up with a solution, striking an agreement with a local timber merchant in a last ditch effort to preserve the view. “I asked him how high a price he expected to pay,” Monet later told a biographer, “promising to make up the difference if the bid went over his amount, on the condition that he would buy the trees for me and leave them standing for a few more months” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 146).
The arrangement proved successful—when the gavel came down, Monet and the lumber merchant were co-owners of the poplars, with the artist proclaiming, “my wallet felt the damage” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1996, p. 280). The venture provided Monet with a reprieve, allowing him to complete the full series of Peupliers paintings over the course of the ensuing months, during which he charted the changing colors of the autumnal foliage as they swept through the landscape, and the seasonal shifts in the weather, which brought overcast skies and brisk winds that buffeted the trees wildly.
The thick, verdant foliage and warm tones of Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule appear to suggest that the view was captured at the height of the trees’ summer growth, and was perhaps one of the paintings Monet was anxious to finish before the impending auction. The painting is particularly remarkable within the series for its extraordinary appreciation of the nuances of changing light, capturing the moment when the sun descends and casts the sky aglow with a resplendent play of vibrant, yet soft, color. A delicately variegated band of pink, peach, blue and purple hues cuts across the middle of the canvas, almost directly in line with the tops of the trees in the middle-distance, the short touches of pigment generating an almost pointillist effect, as they mix and intermingle in carefully structured layers of gently shifting tones. These colors are echoed not only in the reflections in the river, but also within the spray of foliage, and along the barks of the trees, emphasizing the manner in which the final, rich orange rays of the sun transformed the entire landscape with their warmth. In this way, the painting reveals a new level of accuracy in Monet’s observations of the precise nature of light, its dynamic, vibrating surface revealing the hours, days, and weeks he had spent observing the poplars at this particular moment of the day.
Just a few months prior to embarking upon the Peupliers, while still wrestling with his series of Meules, Monet had written to his friend, the journalist and art critic Gustave Geffroy, describing the most recent developments in his painterly practice. “I am grinding away, bent on a series of different effects…” he explained. “I am becoming a very slow worker… but the further I go, the more I understand that it is imperative to work a great deal to achieve what I seek: ‘instantaneity,’ above all” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1990, p. 3). The artist brought this concept to full fruition in works such as Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, spending an extended period of time on his paintings, in order to convey a profound, true impression of the precise fleeting moment. As Paul H. Tucker has noted, “everything about these paintings—from their vertical formats and lyrical compositions, to their more decorative palettes and broader handling—was… one more way to demonstrate his versatility as well as the range of his Impressionist style, and thus stay at the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde” (op. cit., 1997, p. 145).
Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule was among the fifteen works selected by Monet for inclusion in a dedicated exhibition held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris between 29 February and 10 March 1892, and appears as the first painting noted in a hand-written checklist for the show found in the Durand-Ruel archives. While the exhibition of his Meules series the previous year had included several compositions by the artist which dealt with other subjects, for this show Monet chose to limit the display to the Peupliers alone, a concept further emphasized by the choice of title for the exhibition—Monet: Série des peupliers des bords de l’Epte. Presenting the suite of poplar paintings together in this way would, he believed, create a more cohesive visual impact, and encourage visitors to fully appreciate the subtle differences he had achieved from composition to composition. Though it ran for just eleven days, the show proved a resounding success, and the Peupliers were extraordinarily well-received by collectors and critics.
In a review of the show, George Lecomte wrote that the artist “seems more and more to abstract the durable character of things from complex appearances and, by a more synthetic and pre-meditated rendering, to accentuate meaning and decorative beauty,” while the critic for L’Ermitage proclaimed Monet had secured his place within the canon of great masters of French painting, “because he understood the poplar, which summarizes with all the grace, all the spirit, all the youth of our land” (quoted in ibid., pp. 150 and 151). In a letter to the artist, Octave Mirbeau waxed lyrically about the poetic beauty of the works, describing them as “absolutely admirable, a series in which you [Monet] renew yourself… and… attain the absolute beauty of great decoration” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1990, p. 142). Moreover, Mirbeau expressed the undeniable power of these images, which clearly overwhelmed him. As he explained, in front of these paintings, he felt “complete joy… an emotion that I cannot express, so profound [was it] that I wanted to hug you… Never did any artist ever render anything equal to it” (quoted in ibid., pp. 142-143).
Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule was purchased from the artist by Durand-Ruel in January 1892, a full month before the opening of Monet: Série des peupliers des bords de l’Epte, and the painting remained in his family’s possession until 1955, passing to his granddaughter Marie-Louise d’Alayer de Costemore d’Arc. It appeared in a number of important international exhibitions during this time, including A Loan Collection of Pictures by Painters of the French School, which took place at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London during the summer of 1898. Acquired by the family of the present owners more than six decades ago, the painting has been on long term loan at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the past thirty-five years, where it hung alongside the museum’s world-renowned collection of Impressionist paintings.
Across the group of two dozen works that make up the Peupliers series (Wildenstein, nos. 1291-1313), Monet focused on the slender, towering form of the poplar tree, an iconic and instantly recognizable element within the surrounding countryside. He had come across a picturesque stretch of these trees planted on the edge of the river Epte just a few kilometers from his home in Giverny during the spring of 1891, and spent much of the rest of the year studying their changing character under various atmospheric conditions. Each created from almost exactly the same vantage point, near a spot where the Epte bends back on itself twice to create a distinctive S-shape, the resulting compositions are a powerful showcase of the artist’s bourgeoning serial technique, which would come to define Monet’s output across the final three decades of his career.
A common feature within the French countryside during the nineteenth century, poplars were typically found lining the entrance routes to grand châteaux, or standing along rural roads as windshields for tilled fields, while land owners around the country planted them as a form of fencing to demarcate property boundaries. Lithe and elegant, they grew quickly—generally twenty-five to thirty feet in a decade—making them a popular investment for speculators, while their ability to quickly absorb large amounts of water made them a perfect addition to river banks as protection against flooding. Moreover, following the French Revolution, the poplar had become a symbol of liberty, largely due to its name, which derived from the Latin populus, meaning both “people” and “popular.” By 1793, sixty thousand poplars had been planted in France, and hundreds of broadsides were issued featuring the tree as a symbol of the new republic. Ceremonial plantings were common on important anniversaries, most notably in 1889 to mark the centenary of the Revolution, and the tree was seen as an emblem of the stability, beauty and fecundity of rural France within the public imagination.
Poplars had been a favorite motif of Monet’s since the beginnings of his painterly career—in one of his earliest known compositions, Vue prise à Rouelles (1858, Wildenstein, no. 1; Marunuma Art Park, Asaka) a bank of poplars occupies the center of the composition, their slender forms rising above the surrounding vegetation to draw the eye towards the middle distance. Similarly, the trees abound in a number of the artist’s views of Argenteuil and Vétheuil, while the sequence of paintings devoted to the verdant meadows that emerged following his move to Giverny in 1883 most often featured a row of regularly spaced poplars along the edge of the field. While they appear in the background of nearly half of the artist’s Meules paintings, it was not until his fortuitous discovery of the sweeping row of poplars along the Epte that Monet took the opportunity to focus on the slender silhouettes of these trees fully, bringing them in from the edge of the landscape to the foreground of his paintings, and granting them a new prominence and monumentality in the process.
Anchoring his view in the natural topography of the river, as it winds its way through the countryside, in these works Monet presents a dynamic view of the poplars along the water’s edge. Most of the series focuses on a screen of tall, slender poplars in the foreground, while behind, looping away along the river bank, the rest of the trees generate a striking arabesque pattern as they follow the water. In Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, rather than looking directly at the poplars, Monet turned slightly to the left to accentuate the sweeping, diagonal progression of the trees, generating a vivid sense of depth within the painting, as the eye follows their line from right to left and back again, before they disappear into the distance in a flurry of foliage. The lower portion of the canvas is devoted to the rippling surface of the water, filled with the reflections of the tree trunks, which seem to softly dematerialize before the eye, offering a striking contrast to the strong, upright forms of the poplars themselves.
The low vantage point, just slightly above the level of the water, suggests that the artist worked from the bateau atelier that he had built during his years at Argenteuil. This ingeniously modified, modest row boat allowed the artist to bring multiple canvases, painting supplies, and even an easel with him to his chosen site. Each morning, rather than walking from his home in Giverny, Monet was able to set off from his gardens, rowing directly to this section of the river via a tributary that ran through his property. Once he reached the poplars, he anchored the boat in the center of the river Epte and set to work. Looking up at the trees from the deck of the boat, Monet sought to capture an impression of their vertiginous profiles, accentuating the height and verticality of the trees by elongating the poplars and their reflections so that they filled the entire stretch of his canvas.
However, just as he was fully immersed in this intriguing new motif, Monet received word that the village of Limetz, which owned the trees along the Epte, intended to sell the bank of poplars at an upcoming auction. They had been planted on communal land as a cash crop, and by June 1891 had reached an appropriate height for harvest. The artist appealed directly to the local mayor to delay the sale, but to no avail, and in a letter of 28 July, Monet lamented that there remained “quantities of new canvases which I must finish” (quoted in J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven, 1986, p. 201). It was only on the day of the auction itself that he came up with a solution, striking an agreement with a local timber merchant in a last ditch effort to preserve the view. “I asked him how high a price he expected to pay,” Monet later told a biographer, “promising to make up the difference if the bid went over his amount, on the condition that he would buy the trees for me and leave them standing for a few more months” (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 146).
The arrangement proved successful—when the gavel came down, Monet and the lumber merchant were co-owners of the poplars, with the artist proclaiming, “my wallet felt the damage” (quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1996, p. 280). The venture provided Monet with a reprieve, allowing him to complete the full series of Peupliers paintings over the course of the ensuing months, during which he charted the changing colors of the autumnal foliage as they swept through the landscape, and the seasonal shifts in the weather, which brought overcast skies and brisk winds that buffeted the trees wildly.
The thick, verdant foliage and warm tones of Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule appear to suggest that the view was captured at the height of the trees’ summer growth, and was perhaps one of the paintings Monet was anxious to finish before the impending auction. The painting is particularly remarkable within the series for its extraordinary appreciation of the nuances of changing light, capturing the moment when the sun descends and casts the sky aglow with a resplendent play of vibrant, yet soft, color. A delicately variegated band of pink, peach, blue and purple hues cuts across the middle of the canvas, almost directly in line with the tops of the trees in the middle-distance, the short touches of pigment generating an almost pointillist effect, as they mix and intermingle in carefully structured layers of gently shifting tones. These colors are echoed not only in the reflections in the river, but also within the spray of foliage, and along the barks of the trees, emphasizing the manner in which the final, rich orange rays of the sun transformed the entire landscape with their warmth. In this way, the painting reveals a new level of accuracy in Monet’s observations of the precise nature of light, its dynamic, vibrating surface revealing the hours, days, and weeks he had spent observing the poplars at this particular moment of the day.
Just a few months prior to embarking upon the Peupliers, while still wrestling with his series of Meules, Monet had written to his friend, the journalist and art critic Gustave Geffroy, describing the most recent developments in his painterly practice. “I am grinding away, bent on a series of different effects…” he explained. “I am becoming a very slow worker… but the further I go, the more I understand that it is imperative to work a great deal to achieve what I seek: ‘instantaneity,’ above all” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1990, p. 3). The artist brought this concept to full fruition in works such as Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, spending an extended period of time on his paintings, in order to convey a profound, true impression of the precise fleeting moment. As Paul H. Tucker has noted, “everything about these paintings—from their vertical formats and lyrical compositions, to their more decorative palettes and broader handling—was… one more way to demonstrate his versatility as well as the range of his Impressionist style, and thus stay at the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde” (op. cit., 1997, p. 145).
Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule was among the fifteen works selected by Monet for inclusion in a dedicated exhibition held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris between 29 February and 10 March 1892, and appears as the first painting noted in a hand-written checklist for the show found in the Durand-Ruel archives. While the exhibition of his Meules series the previous year had included several compositions by the artist which dealt with other subjects, for this show Monet chose to limit the display to the Peupliers alone, a concept further emphasized by the choice of title for the exhibition—Monet: Série des peupliers des bords de l’Epte. Presenting the suite of poplar paintings together in this way would, he believed, create a more cohesive visual impact, and encourage visitors to fully appreciate the subtle differences he had achieved from composition to composition. Though it ran for just eleven days, the show proved a resounding success, and the Peupliers were extraordinarily well-received by collectors and critics.
In a review of the show, George Lecomte wrote that the artist “seems more and more to abstract the durable character of things from complex appearances and, by a more synthetic and pre-meditated rendering, to accentuate meaning and decorative beauty,” while the critic for L’Ermitage proclaimed Monet had secured his place within the canon of great masters of French painting, “because he understood the poplar, which summarizes with all the grace, all the spirit, all the youth of our land” (quoted in ibid., pp. 150 and 151). In a letter to the artist, Octave Mirbeau waxed lyrically about the poetic beauty of the works, describing them as “absolutely admirable, a series in which you [Monet] renew yourself… and… attain the absolute beauty of great decoration” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1990, p. 142). Moreover, Mirbeau expressed the undeniable power of these images, which clearly overwhelmed him. As he explained, in front of these paintings, he felt “complete joy… an emotion that I cannot express, so profound [was it] that I wanted to hug you… Never did any artist ever render anything equal to it” (quoted in ibid., pp. 142-143).
Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule was purchased from the artist by Durand-Ruel in January 1892, a full month before the opening of Monet: Série des peupliers des bords de l’Epte, and the painting remained in his family’s possession until 1955, passing to his granddaughter Marie-Louise d’Alayer de Costemore d’Arc. It appeared in a number of important international exhibitions during this time, including A Loan Collection of Pictures by Painters of the French School, which took place at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London during the summer of 1898. Acquired by the family of the present owners more than six decades ago, the painting has been on long term loan at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the past thirty-five years, where it hung alongside the museum’s world-renowned collection of Impressionist paintings.