About this work
What greets you in any canvas from Monet's *Haystacks* series is deceptively simple: one or more stacks of harvested grain rising out of the fields at Giverny , their conical forms — common to the Normandy region — covered in a thatched layer of hay to protect the wheat or grain beneath. Yet the subject is almost beside the point. Painting the same objects in different months, at various times of day, Monet made light into his true subject.
In all, Monet created 25 works which significantly vary in composition and palette — some featuring two full stacks, others just one truncated by the picture's edge; snowy landscapes and long, blue shadows alternating with verdant surroundings full of green trees and lush grass.
The result is at once naturalistic and fictitious — the design is realistic, but the colours are curious: Monet mixes stippled purples, whites, and greens in areas where they would not usually belong, making the light itself seem luminous, bouncing off the canvas and into the eyes of the viewer.
For about 18 months, between 1890 and 1891, Monet focused on this subject matter and created around 30 paintings.
He originally asked his stepdaughter Blanche Hoschedé to bring him two canvases — one for sunny and one for overcast conditions — but quickly found that the ever-changing light demanded far more; soon she was bringing as many as her wheelbarrow could hold. Monet's daily routine came to involve carting paints, easels, and many unfinished canvases back and forth, working on whichever most closely resembled the scene of the moment.
*Haystacks* was the first group of paintings Monet exhibited as a series; fifteen were shown in Paris at the Galerie Durand-Ruel.
An unprecedented critical and financial success, the exhibition marked a breakthrough in Monet's career, as well as in the history of French art. The ripples reached far beyond Impressionism: Kandinsky would later recall in his memoirs, "What suddenly became clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, which I had not understood before and which surpassed my wildest dreams."
As Sotheby's later noted, "It was in 1890 with the Haystacks that Monet first began an intrepid exploration of the varying effects of light and atmosphere on a single subject" — a pursuit that would come to define his contribution not only to Impressionism but to Abstraction and 20th-century art.
As a fine art print
