Champ de coquelicots

In the summer of 1890 Monet was about to become a property owner. For years he had only rented the house at Giverny, west of Paris. That November he finally bought it, and the fields he had been walking through became, in a sense, the view from home. This poppy field is one of four near-identical canvases he painted that July, all the same size, all worked in the same warm key. Within months he would begin the stacks of wheat that made him rich and famous, painting a single subject over and over as the light shifted across it. You can already feel that habit forming here, one red field studied again and again for the way the light settled on it.