This painting is an early representation of grainstacks and poplars, subjects to which Monet would return in his series paintings of the 1890s. But this landscape reflects his primary concern in the 1870s: rendering air and depth through color. Contrasting highlights (red and green, purple and yellow), picked out in bright impasto, seem to bring the foreground closer to the viewer, while cool tones of more fluidly applied paint suggest the background’s recession to a hazy distance.
