This work is one of four similar views of the plain of Gennevilliers, just southeast of Argenteuil, which Monet executed in the summer of 1875. He first painted the subject two years earlier in the celebrated Poppies at Argenteuil (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

Claude Monet painted The Poppy Field, near Argenteuil in 1873. Painted in the wildflower fields outside Argenteuil, this painting reveals Monet's passion for color. With dabs of red, he scatters the blooms in a natural profusion across the lush green fields.

In the foreground, he sketches in the figures of Camille and Jean with simple strokes of violet, black, and white. Their figures appear again at the top of the hills in the distance, more a suggestion of color than an accurate record of their appearance. This work has been published in the Museum's Bulletin or Journal. These articles may or may not represent the most current scholarship.

When he returned from England in 1871, Monet settled in Argenteuil and lived there until 1878. These years were a time of fulfilment for him. Supported by his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet found in the region around his home the bright landscapes which enabled him to explore the potential of plein-air painting. He showed Poppy Field to the public at the first Impressionist exhibition held in the photographer Nadar's disused studio in 1874. Now one of the world's most famous paintings, it conjures up the vibrant atmosphere of a stroll through the fields on a summer's day.

Monet diluted the contours and constructed a colourful rhythm with blobs of paint starting from a sprinkling of poppies; the disproportionately large patches in the foreground indicate the primacy he put on visual impression. A step towards abstraction had been taken. In the landscape, a mother and child pair in the foreground and another in the background are merely a pretext for drawing the diagonal line that structures the oil painting. Two separate colour zones are established, one dominated by red, the other by a bluish green. The young woman with the sunshade and the child in the foreground are probably the artist's wife, Camille, and their son Jean.

If you remove the color, most of the poppies cannot be seen in the field. The poppies and field are equiluminant. As has been noted, the Impressionists painted not a landscape but the impression of a landscape. Nothing here is painted exactly; rather, everything is suggested. Monet unforgettably evokes a mood by choosing these shades of green and red. If he painted flowers of another color, the hillside would be stagnant.