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Lot Essay
In August 1878, Monet left the bustling suburban town of Argenteuil, where he had lived and worked since the Franco-Prussian War, and settled some sixty kilometers to the west in the rural enclave of Vétheuil, population six hundred. The appeal of Argenteuil had waned for the artist as the encroachments of modernity—new factories, expanded rail service, a burgeoning tourist industry—increasingly disrupted its bucolic calm. Vétheuil, by contrast, offered an older, more timeless vision of the French countryside, far from the Parisian sprawl—“a ravishing spot,” Monet declared, “from which I should be able to extract some things that aren’t bad” (quoted in M. Clarke and R. Thomson, op. cit., 2003, p. 17).
At Vétheuil, Monet entirely abandoned the scenes of modern life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argenteuil and began to focus instead on capturing nature in its most fugitive aspects. “The acknowledged painter of contemporary life who settled in Vétheuil in 1878 departed from that town in 1881, as from a chrysalis, renewed and redirected,” Carole McNamara has written (Monet at Vétheuil: The Turning Point, Ann Arbor, 1998, p. 86).
Le Pommier, painted during Monet’s first spring at Vétheuil, is a portrait of a single blossoming apple tree, centrally placed, its branches reaching out almost to fill the picture space. A well-trodden footpath enters the scene at the bottom left, drawing the eye toward a diminutive figure who stands beneath the tree, a proxy for the plein air painter. The day is pleasantly overcast, lending the light a delicate, silvery quality. In a second painting that Monet made of the exact same motif, the clouds have parted and the sun is lower in the sky, producing stronger contrasts and a more golden tonality (Wildenstein, no. 524).
“These paintings give a vibrant sense of a spring day, the blossoming fruit trees making their presence emphatically—if temporarily—felt,” Richard Thomson has written. “They articulate the landscape painter’s thrill at seeing burgeoning nature push human presence to the margins” (op. cit., 2003, p. 64).
At Vétheuil, Monet entirely abandoned the scenes of modern life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argenteuil and began to focus instead on capturing nature in its most fugitive aspects. “The acknowledged painter of contemporary life who settled in Vétheuil in 1878 departed from that town in 1881, as from a chrysalis, renewed and redirected,” Carole McNamara has written (Monet at Vétheuil: The Turning Point, Ann Arbor, 1998, p. 86).
Le Pommier, painted during Monet’s first spring at Vétheuil, is a portrait of a single blossoming apple tree, centrally placed, its branches reaching out almost to fill the picture space. A well-trodden footpath enters the scene at the bottom left, drawing the eye toward a diminutive figure who stands beneath the tree, a proxy for the plein air painter. The day is pleasantly overcast, lending the light a delicate, silvery quality. In a second painting that Monet made of the exact same motif, the clouds have parted and the sun is lower in the sky, producing stronger contrasts and a more golden tonality (Wildenstein, no. 524).
“These paintings give a vibrant sense of a spring day, the blossoming fruit trees making their presence emphatically—if temporarily—felt,” Richard Thomson has written. “They articulate the landscape painter’s thrill at seeing burgeoning nature push human presence to the margins” (op. cit., 2003, p. 64).