Los tilos en Poissy

In the early 1880s Monet was living at Poissy, a town on the Seine just west of Paris, and by all accounts he did not much like it. He complained that it gave him nothing to paint, and he made comparatively few pictures during the two years or so he spent there before moving on. This row of lime trees, painted in 1882, is one of the things he did find worth setting up his easel for, a plain avenue of tall trees rather than any grand view. Within a year he had left Poissy for a house down the river at Giverny, where he would spend the rest of his life and dig the water garden.