With his second wife, Alice, Monet went to live in Giverny in 1883, where he designed a garden which he painted for the rest of his life. It was not long after he first moved there that he painted Willows in Haze, Giverny (1886) with six willows in a meadow, bathed in sunlight, rhythmically grouped in a horizontal line across the image.
In this painting, Monet has pushed the Impressionist technique to its limits. In his quest to capture his impression of a scene as it appeared to him in the light of the moment, he has abandoned a classical depiction for a fluid, rhythmic style in which colour is key. The painting has a relatively limited value range; instead, the contrasts are created by heightened colours, with the cold, pale blue shadows set against the sunlit, white and greenish-yellow ground. The contrasting hues and rhythmic, sweeping brushwork and patches of colour convey an impression of air, a breeze, and strong sunlight, with the sun glaring off the ground. There is another version in London of the same scene done in a colder tone; a similar motif, done during a flood, is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
