Haystacks is the common English title for a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The principal subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat (or possibly barley or oats: the original French title, Les Meules à Giverny, simply means The Stacks at Giverny, obviously concerning stacks of straw). The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series (Wildenstein Index Numbers 1266–1290) which Monet began near the end of the summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring, though Monet also produced five earlier paintings using this same stack subject. A precursor to the series is the 1884 Haystack Near Giverny (Pushkin Museum).
The series is famous for the way in which Monet repeated the same subject to show the differing light and atmosphere at different times of day, across the seasons and in many types of weather.
The series is among Monet's most notable works. The largest Haystacks collections are held at the Musée d'Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, and in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago collection includes six of the twenty-five Haystacks.
Other collections include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.
Other museums that hold parts of this series include the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut (which also has one of five from the earlier 1888–89 harvest), the Scottish National Gallery, the National Gallery (England), Museum Barberini, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Kunsthaus Zürich, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Shelburne Museum, Vermont. Private collections hold the remaining Haystacks paintings.
Monet background
Monet settled in Giverny in 1883. Most of his paintings from 1883 until his death 40 years later were of scenes within of his home and gardens. Monet was intensely aware of and fascinated by the visual nuances of the region's landscape and by the endless variations in the days and in the seasons—the stacks were just outside his door.Tucker, p.87.
Monet had previously painted a single subject in different light and different moods. However, as he matured as a painter, his depictions of atmospheric influences were increasingly concerned not only with specific effects but with the overall color harmonies that allowed him an autonomous use of rich color.House, page 127. The conventional wisdom was that the stacks were a simple subject but also an unimaginative one. However, contemporary writers and friends of the artist noted that Monet's subject matter was always carefully chosen, the product of careful thought and analysis.Tucker, p.33. Monet undertook to capture the stacks in direct light and then to re-examine them from the same view-point in different, often more muted, light and atmospheric conditions. It was then not unusual for Monet, in search of harmonious transitions within the series, to alter the canvases back in his studio."It is worth remembering that the stacks were literally at his doorstep, as photographs of the area make clear
Series background The stacks depicted in the series are commonly referred to in English as hay, wheat or grain-stacks. In reality they stored sheafs of grain primarily for bread—so wheat [or possibly barley or oats]—and not hay, an animal food. The stacks were a way of keeping the sheafs dry until the grain could be separated from the stalks by threshing.Lemonedes, p. 143. The local method of storing and drying unthreshed-grains was to use straw, or sometimes hay, as a thatched 'roof' for the stack, shielding the wheat, barley or oats from the elements until, once dry-enough, they could be threshed. The threshing machines then traveled from village to village. Thus, although the grain was harvested and the stacks were built by July, it often took until the following spring or even later—so through all the light and atmosphere changes of summer, autumn, winter and spring—for all the stacks to be reached by the threshing-machines. Grain storage/drying-stacks like these became common throughout Europe in the 19th century and survived until the inception of combine harvesters. The shapes of stacks were regional: in Normandy, where Giverny is situated, it was common for them to be round with quite steeply pitched thatched 'roofs'—just as Monet painted.
The stacks belonged to Monet's farmer-neighbour, Monsieur Quéruel. Noticing the way the light changed on M. Quéruel's stacks, Monet asked his stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé, to bring him two canvases, one for sunny and one for overcast conditions.Kelder, p.183. But Monet soon found he could not catch the ever-changing light and mood on merely two canvases: as a result, his willing helper was quickly bringing as many canvases as her wheelbarrow could hold.The veracity of this story has been doubted: '"When I began I was like the others; I believed that two canvases would suffice, one for gray weather and one for sun! At the time I was painting some stacks .... One day I saw that my light had changed. I said to my stepdaughter: 'Go to the house, if you don't mind, and bring me another canvas!'" And so Monet worked on the story: another canvas! Another! The fact is that ever since he had started to paint he had had the habit of working from the same motif under different conditions .... And yet there is something new here, a difference of emphasis.' Forge and Gordon, p. 158. Monet's daily routine therefore came to involve carting paints, easels and many unfinished canvases back and forth, working on whichever canvas most closely resembled the scene of the moment as the conditions and light fluctuated. Although he began painting the stacks en plein air, Monet later revised his initial impressions in his studio, both to generate contrast and to preserve the harmony within the series.Lemonedes, p. 139.
Monet produced numerous Haystacks paintings. He painted five paintings (Wildenstein Index Numbers 1213–1217) with stacks as his primary subject during the 1888 harvest.Tucker, p.31. His earlier landscapes (Wildenstein Index Number 900–995, 1073) had included stacks [and also some more-accurately described hayricks: that is smaller piles of hay for animal-feed] in an ancillary manner. The general consensus is that only the canvases produced using the 1890 harvest (Wildenstein Index Number 1266–1290) comprise the Haystacks series proper. However some commentators include additional paintings when referencing this series. For example, the Hill-Stead Museum talk of their two stack paintings even though one is from the 'proper' 1890 harvest, the other from the 1888 harvest.
Monet's Haystacks series is one of his earliest to rely on repetition to illustrate nuances in his perception across natural variations such as times of day, seasons, and types of weather. For Monet, the concept of producing and exhibiting a series of paintings related by subject and vantage point began in 1889, with at least ten paintings done at the Valley of the Creuse, and subsequently shown at the Galerie Georges Petit.Tucker, p.41. This interest in the serial motif would continue for the rest of his career.
Thematic issues Although the mundane subject was constant throughout the Haystack series, the underlying theme may be seen as the transience of light. This concept enabled Monet to use repetition to show nuances of perception as the time of day, the seasons and the weather changed. The almost unvarying subject provided the basis for him to compare changes of light and mood across his nuanced series.So as to return to a painting at the correct moment, "on occasion Monet took the precaution of writing the time of day on the back of his canvases". House, p.143. The first paintings in the series were started in late September or early October 1890, and he continued producing these paintings for about seven months. These paintings made Monet the first painter to paint such a large quantity of pictures of the same subject matter differentiated by light, weather, atmosphere and perspective.
Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, Monet focused on Haystacks and a number of other subjects (other series included the Mornings on the Seine, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, and the Water Lilies, among others). In order to work on many paintings virtually simultaneously, he would awake before dawn so as to begin at the earliest time of day:
As the morning progressed and the light changed he would switch to sequentially later canvas settings, sometimes working on as many as ten or twelve paintings a day, each one depicting a slightly different aspect of light.In a letter to Alice Monet dated March 29, 1893, Monet wrote of having worked on fourteen paintings in one day at Rouen. House, p.144. The process would be repeated over the course of days, weeks, or months, depending on the weather and the progress of the paintings until they were completed. As the seasons changed the process was renewed.
Certain effects of light only last for a few minutes, thus the canvases documenting such ephemera received attention for no more than a few minutes a day."In 1883 Jules Laforgue had spoken of a quarter hour as the natural time span for an Impressionist painting, while Monet himself mentioned seven minutes as the limit for one of his Poplar series ... and in 1918 talked of effects which lasted 'sometimes three or four minutes at the most'". House, p.142. Further complicating matters, the light of subsequent sunrises, for example, could alter substantially and would require separate canvases within the series."The constantly varying weather, rather than any idea of a final pictorial ensemble, remained his initial reason for endlessly multiplying his canvases." House, page 204. Subsequently, different hues are evident in each painting, and in each work, color is used to describe not only direct but reflected light. At differing times of day and in various seasons stacks absorb the light from diverse parts of the color spectrum. As a result, the residual light that is reflected off of the stacks is seen as ever-changing, and manifests in distinctive coloring."In Grain Stack at Sunset intense brick reds give the shadowed side of the stack an incandescent core, while the light of the sunset haloes the stack with vermilion and yellow, and scatters the lit parts of the field with particles of pink, orange, and mauve." House, page 128.
Many notable painters have been influenced by this particular series, including Les Fauves, Derain, and Vlaminck. Kandinsky's memoirs refer to the series: "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."Excerpts from Kandinsky's memoirs, page 53. CDlib.org Retrieved May 30, 2007.