Claude Monet, the French Impressionist, painted the grain stacks near his home at Giverny, west of Paris, because he wanted to paint light, and a lone stack in an open field shows every change in it.
In some twenty five canvases, the same stacks appear at sunset, under snow and in mist. The light moved so fast that in October 1890 he told his friend, the critic Gustave Geffroy, that the sun set before he could keep pace.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Monet chose two stacks of wheat standing side by side in a field next to the house he rented at Giverny. He began in the early autumn of 1890, sure that his subject, at least, would not move.
The stacks were not scenery. They belonged to a farmer and held his harvest, and Monet had to persuade him to leave them standing through the autumn instead of threshing them, which means beating the grain out of the stalks.
The arrangement did not last. One account of the series says that during the winter the farmer began to thresh, and one of the two stacks was consumed. Half of Monet's motif was gone.
Two stacks were still enough for the whole series. Monet painted the same one or two cones again and again, each time at another hour or in other weather.
Wheat, not hay
The name of the series hides what the farmer was protecting…
What You'll Discover
What he painted out of the picture.
How long one instant took.
What happened when fifteen stacks hung in one room.
What a visitor in Moscow couldn't see.