Wind Effect Series of Poplars Claude Monet Postcard

Wind Effect, Series of the Poplars by Claude Monet, oil on canvas 1891, is a landscape painting of rows of tall poplar trees that soar high above the low horizon of a meadow of green grass. The wind pushes and slightly bends the trunks and branches to the left. The long, spindly forms of three foreground trees completely fill the picture plane of the vertical composition from top to bottom, silhouetted against the luminous, grey cloudy sky in cool tones of blue-green. A planted row of poplars glows in contrasting tones of warm green as they shake in the breeze in the background. Monet constructs an image of light and air that begins to border on a kind of abstraction of colour and shape as he captures a fleeting moment in nature. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder and chief driving force behind the French Impressionist school of painting. Born in Paris, Monet studied with Eugene Boudin, who taught the basics of oil painting and plein-air (open air) easel painting, and later with painter Charles Gleyre, eventually befriending fellow Impressionists Manet, Renoir, Bazille and others. Rejected by the Paris Salon and other venues of the 19th century academic establishment, the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting moments in time in bright, broken colour and small, rapid brushstrokes. Monet lived and studied in London and Holland, producing many paintings, until the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where his painting Impression: Sunrise gained notoriety and earned the group its famous moniker. Following the death of his child and of his first wife Camille, Monet settled in Giverny, where increasing success allowed him to establish a home and studio surrounded by elaborate gardens. Monet painted many landscapes, including garden scenes and his famous Cathedral series, with increasing concerns for light, colour and atmosphere, with a concern for colour and shapes that in his older age bordered on a kind of abstraction, making him one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.