Poppy Field (Giverny)

Poppy Field (Giverny) is one of the few large, richly worked canvases Claude Monet painted of the meadow behind his new garden at Giverny, where in 1883 he had settled for the rest of his life. Painted in 1890–91, at the very threshold of the great water-lily series, the picture shows a low bench of scarlet poppies in the foreground running to a line of great trees beneath a high summer sky. The handling is broad and free, the poppies dashed in with quick bright strokes, and the whole canvas vibrates between the green of the meadow and the red of the flowers — colour at its most unapologetic. It belongs to the same eager, sunlit moment as the first Haystacks, and shows Monet turning a corner of his own garden into a moten celebration of midsummer. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.