Grainstacks, White Frost Effect

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. The Hill-Stead’s painting was one of the first three, and Monet included it in a joint exhibition with Auguste Rodin at Galerie Georges Petit in the summer of 1889.