The Stacks Outside His Door
Two canvases weren't enough. Soon a wheelbarrow could barely keep up with the light.
In the late summer of 1890, Claude Monet stood in a field just outside his home in Giverny, watching sunlight shift across a row of grain stacks belonging to his farmer-neighbor, Monsieur Quéruel. He had settled in Giverny in 1883, and for the next forty years, nearly everything he painted lay within three kilometers of his garden. The stacks were simply there, outside his door, ten to twenty feet tall, round-topped and thatched in the Norman style, storing wheat, barley, or oats until threshing machines could make their rounds from village to village.
At first Monet asked his stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé, to bring him two canvases — one for sunny weather, one for overcast. It didn't take long for him to realize that two canvases could never hold the restless variety of light he saw. Blanche began wheeling out as many canvases as her wheelbarrow could carry, and Monet's days turned into a shuttle between easels, working on whichever canvas most closely matched the moment's atmosphere before it slipped away.
This wasn't Monet's first attempt at painting a single subject under changing light. But by 1890 his ambitions had matured: he wasn't just chasing fleeting effects, he was building color harmonies that gave him a freer, richer use of paint. Critics of the day dismissed the haystack as a dull, unimaginative subject, but those close to Monet insisted his choices were never careless — every subject was the result of deliberate thought.
The series most art historians consider the true 'Haystacks' comprises twenty-five canvases, cataloged as Wildenstein numbers 1266 to 1290, begun near the end of summer 1890 and continued into the following spring. Monet had experimented with the subject earlier too — five paintings from the 1888 harvest, and a precursor called Haystack Near Giverny, painted in 1884 and now held at the Pushkin Museum. Earlier still, stacks had appeared as minor details in his broader landscapes.
The stacks in the paintings are often called haystacks in English, but that's something of a misnomer. What they held was mostly wheat, destined for bread, not hay for animal feed. Straw or hay was simply used as a thatched covering to protect the grain from rain and damp until threshing time. Because the traveling threshing machines might not reach a village until well into the next year, the same stack could stand through summer, autumn, winter, and spring — giving Monet an entire calendar of light to work with on a single, unmoving form.
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