Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny by Monet Jigsaw Puzzle

Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny by Claude Monet, oil on canvas 1885, is a landscape painting of a bowl-shaped hollow in the hills of the French countryside, a patch of poppy flowers glowing red beneath a warm, sunny sky. Painted in quick brushstrokes of brilliant colours, the picture epitomises the Impressionist concerns with light, colour, atmosphere, and capturing nature in a fleeting moment of time. Monet’s efforts in painting directly from nature elevated plein-air easel painting to the level of great art. Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder and chief driving force behind the French Impressionist school of painting. Born in Paris, Monet studied with Eugene Boudin, who taught the basics of oil painting and plein-air (open air) easel painting, and later with painter Charles Gleyre, eventually befriending fellow Impressionists Manet, Renoir, Bazille and others. Rejected by the Paris Salon and other venues of the 19th century academic establishment, the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting moments in time, in bright, broken colour and small, rapid brushstrokes. Monet lived and studied in London and Holland, producing many paintings, until the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where his painting Impression: Sunrise gained notoriety and earned the group its famous moniker. Following the death of his child and of his first wife Camille, Monet settled in Giverny, where increasing success allowed him to establish a home and studio surrounded by elaborate gardens. Monet painted many landscapes, including garden scenes and his famous Cathedral series, with increasing concerns for light, colour and atmosphere, with a concern for colour and shapes that in his older age bordered on a kind of abstraction, making him one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.