The expressive contrast concerns, on the one hand, the boys who stretch and yawn in disturbingly exaggerated, sleepy intoxication, as if in painful spasms, and, on the other hand, the landscape element. The flowery meadow is illuminated by the strikes of the blood-red poppies and the blinding white of field flowers in the hot southern sun, although the sky in this oneiric image stretches over the meadow with a stripe of deep, almost evening blue.
The origin of the melting of figures with the landscape into one expressive whole, so characteristic of Poppies, can be traced to Weiss’s first works. Initially, his landscapes were subordinated to the characters as blurred, undefined backgrounds emphasising the mood of the pictures. This can be seen in Weiss’s crypto-portraits such as Student, Lunger or in one of his most famous paintings – Melancholic (called ‘Totenmesse’ by the painter himself). The very title brings to the fore the painting’s emotional meaning and universalises it by masking the portrait aspect, although the identity of the ‘Melancholic’ is still well known to us today – the face was lent to him by Weiss’s colleague, the painter Antoni Procajłowicz.
The identity of the boys depicted in Poppies is a little less certain. Juszczak pointed out their similarity to the sons of Konstanty Górski portrayed in one of Weiss’ pastels. However, it is most probably the sons of the mayor of Strzyżów who posed for Poppies. Between 1898 and 1903, between his long stays in Italy, Weiss regularly returned to this village and painted the surrounding landscapes.