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). 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 work. The largest Haystacks collections are held at the Musée d'Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, and in the Art Institute of Chicago. 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. The Art Institute of Chicago collection includes six of the twenty-five Haystacks.
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 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.