Poppy Field. Around Giverny

Claude Monet had moved to the village of Giverny, northwest of Paris, in 1883, and the fields around his new home gave him a subject he returned to for years. From about 1885 he painted the local poppy fields again and again, less for the flowers themselves than for the way shifting weather changed that vivid red from one hour to the next. This canvas is worked in quick, almost abstract dabs, laid down fast and sure. It carries no signature. After Monet's death his son Michel confirmed it as his father's work, and it later reached the museum in Rouen.