Monet’s earliest surviving oil, painted at eighteen in 1858, already includes a row of poplars — the trees he’d spend a career circling back to. By 1891 they’d become the whole subject: his first formal series ran to eleven canvases on the River Epte near Giverny, tracking bare trunk against foliage and light as the seasons turned. Howard Oakley’s phrase for the shift: trees stopped being in the landscape and became it.