Three Poplars, Autumn

Monet painted the Poplars series along the Epte River near Giverny between the spring and autumn of 1891. Learning that the local municipality intended to sell the trees for timber, he reportedly negotiated with the buyer to delay felling until he had finished painting them. He produced roughly twenty-four canvases across the four seasons, working from a floating studio moored on the river and sometimes painting four canvases in a single afternoon session as the light changed. The Poplars were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in March 1892, where they were received with immediate critical enthusiasm. Writing for the press, critics noted how the series transformed a specific stand of trees into a sustained argument about Impressionism's central preoccupation: the instability of visual experience over time. The autumn canvases, with their rich warm palette and the gathering weight of the foliage, are among the most emotionally resonant of the group, several entering major museum collections within years of the exhibition. This composition, in which the three trunks are pushed close to the picture plane and the reflection given nearly equal weight with the trees above, is one of the most tightly structured of the series, anticipating the near-abstract organisation Monet would pursue in the Water Lilies decades later.