Grainstacks in Bright Sunlight

By the time Monet painted this work, the Impressionists had already staged their final group exhibition in Paris in 1886; Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism had become the new avant-garde; and Monet, in his late forties, was viewed as an established artist. Now, instead of traveling to tourist destinations to paint, he could turn to subjects near him in Giverny—fields of poppies, the River Epte, and grainstacks. From 1888 to 1889, Monet painted three canvases of two identical grainstacks, and then two more paintings depicting a single grainstack. In 1890, Monet began his familiar suite of 25 grainstack paintings, soon followed by the poplar series, then a series showing the Rouen Cathedral, the Thames, and finally, his best known, the water lily paintings. It has been noted that Monet was following the example set by two Japanese artists he admired, Hokusai in his One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and Hiroshige in his One Hundred Views of the City of Edo. With his grainstack series, Monet was trying to capture what he called “instantaneity” or the effect of the “envelope of light and atmosphere” that defined an object. To do this, he painted the stacks near his home in Giverny throughout the spring, summer, fall, and winter of 1890-91, intending to exhibit the finished paintings together to maintain unity and coherence. The canvases are divided into three parallel bands representing field, hills, and sky. These horizontal bands are linked together not only by color but also by the strong geometric, conical forms of the grainstacks and the roof ridges beyond. An innovative halo of backlighting, in Hill-Stead’s example, outlines the shape of the stacks to define their contours. Fifteen of the 25 grainstack paintings were exhibited by the dealer Durand-Ruel in Paris in May 1891, and all were sold in three days.