オランダのチューリップ畑

In the spring of 1886 a French diplomat in The Hague, an admirer of Monet's, talked him into coming to see the tulip fields in bloom. Monet went reluctantly. He worried the colours were simply unpaintable, bands of pure red and yellow laid across the flat Dutch land, more violent than anything a landscape usually offered. He stayed only about a week and came home with five canvases. This is one of them: rows of tulips running to the horizon under a wide sky, a farmhouse and a windmill breaking the flatness, the reds and golds put down in short thick strokes so the field seems to shimmer. He was not exaggerating. In the bulb country in April, that really is what the ground looks like.