The Poppy Field, a Celebration of Summer
Claude Monet’s well-loved landscape was just one of a handful of radical paintings that heralded the Modern era…
Claude Monet’s Poppy Field, painted in 1873, is one of the world’s most famous landscape paintings. The expanse of scarlet poppies grow among high summer grasses below a backdrop of blue sky and white cloud. The rhythm of a treeline, complete with villa in the distance, divides the canvas horizontally. Four indistinct figures share their celebration of an idyllic summer’s afternoon. Yet this simple canvas challenged the strictures of traditional painting when it was shown at the first ‘impressionist’ exhibition in Paris, which launched a new movement towards modern painting.
Its original French title is simply Les Coquelicots, referring to common corn poppies, and it is generally catalogued as Poppy Field, at Argenteuil. The Franco-Prussian War had ended in 1871 and France was seeking to recover from this turmoil. Monet had just returned from studying in England, where he was influenced by the landscapes of John Constable and J.M.W Turner. He was impressed by their freshness and ability to capture the infinite variability of light within the landscape in a naturalistic manner.
