There is a decade between the
"Supper" and the "Poppies near Vétheuil", filled
with both successes and disappointments. It includes the actual birth of
Impressionism, involuntarily furnished with a label by Monet with his
picture title "Impression, Sunrise" at the first exhibition of
the group in 1874, In the summer of the same year these artists
collaborated in an unprecedented way in Argenteuil, and this resulted in
the definitive emergence of open-air painting. At the same time these
painters were plunged in ever more unbearable distress – owing to a
general economic crisis in France after the defeat in war.
This was not the least reason why Monet increasingly detached himself
from Paris and in January 1878 settled in the village of Vétheuil on
the right bank of the Seine, to remain there till the end of 1881. He
could not thus remedy his distress – increased by the death of
Camille, his wife, but life there was at least cheap, and he found many
subjects in Vétheuil as in Lavacourt on the other side of the Seine. In
Argenteuil he had first painted on a boat to catch all the brilliant
glitter on the water, and he continued to do this in Vétheuil.
But he did not paint Vétheuil from the river or from the opposite bank,
as has been falsely assumed, but he sets up his easel in the flowering
meadows of the Vienne, where the children pick poppies, with a view of
the church between the gentle hills. Monet no longer paints this under
the influence of Manet, but with a dense texture of spots of colour
finely applied, which melts objects and makes the atmosphere the actual
theme. We are close to Seurat’s "Pointillisme". In 1901
Monet again painted in Vétheuil, doing six views exhibited in 1902.
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