Poppy Field Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Description of Gustav Klimt’s painting The Poppy Field

Admirers of his work were already accustomed to his extraordinarily colorful panels, but here the landscape and extremely beautiful. The poppy is the flower of sleep and love. Its scarlet color always tells us about the brightness and transience of love and its rapid flight in human life.

And the fact that the poppy is able to put the mind to sleep has been known since ancient times.

Klimt, almost for the first time turned to the landscape, but how beautiful it turned out. Look how many different flowers there are, but it’s the poppy that dominates. It doesn’t let daisies or cornflowers or violets show their true colors. It is over them, like a king over his inferiors, and even the bushes that are depicted on both sides are unable to suppress the beauty of the flowers.

Klimt deliberately paints only the glade with the poppies and pays almost no attention to the sky and the horizon. Why should he? The main thing is the poppies!

Klimt sacrificed his style a bit here, quite a bit, but still the "carpeting" of flowers remains. Remember his "Kiss". There, right away, and you do not understand what’s going on, because all overshadowed by the magnificent floral ornament on the cloak of a man. Here, on this canvas, it’s the same. Everything is overshadowed by the lively floral ornamentation of poppies and other beauties of the glade.

You get a kind of path of flowers that starts right at the front edge of the canvas and ends somewhere deep inside the painting.

Here, by the way, is another dissimilarity between this work and the others - here he paints in perspective. Here everything is calculated on the distance and angle of view of the audience. But the painting is really so realistic that you want to smell and smell the enchanting smell of a forest or a garden meadow.

After all, poppies don’t smell themselves, their lack of scent can perfectly compensate for the rest of the clearing’s "population. And yet, the color scheme he chose is correct: the green and red colors create a sense of peace and joy. Perhaps that’s why this canvas is always a pleasure to look at.