Poplars in the Sun

Everyone knows Monet's Poplars, the row of slim trees along the Epte that he painted over and over in 1891, chasing the light from one canvas to the next. This is not one of those. It is four years earlier, 1887, when he was working near Giverny and had not yet turned poplars into a formal series. You can see him circling the idea already: the tall trunks, the sun broken up as it falls through the leaves, the ground dappled with shifting patches of colour. What became a disciplined experiment in 1891 is here still a summer's afternoon, looser and more relaxed, the painter noticing how sunlight behaves under trees before he decided to make a system of it.