Grainstack at Giverny

Grainstack at Giverny (La Meule à Giverny) is a canvas Claude Monet painted in 1889, a year before his famous series, and it is one of the first in which a single stack fills the picture. A large, pale straw-colored stack stands at center on a mound of darker straw, behind it a screen of thin, leafless poplars, and beyond them the hills of the Seine valley in rust, brown and violet under a gray-blue sky. Signed and dated 89 Claude Monet, it belongs to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the anonymous gift of 1973.

What you are looking at

The stack is unlike the tidy, cone-roofed stacks of the later series. Its upper part is a rounded heap of cream and pale gold, built from swirling, looping strokes that suggest loose, freshly piled straw. Its lower part is a ragged band of brown, rust and dark orange, as if older or damp straw had been packed around the base. It sits slightly left of center and fills nearly half the height of the canvas.

Behind it, a row of slender trees, almost bare, runs across the picture, painted with thin vertical strokes of gray, green and brown. Beyond, the hills are surprisingly strong in color: bands of plum, brick red and dark violet, with a hint of a road or stream in pale blue curling down at right. The foreground is a mix of yellow stubble, green grass and rust-colored earth, laid in broad, rough strokes. The sky is a cloudy blue-gray, worked in curving strokes. The date and signature are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted in the fields near his Giverny house throughout the late 1880s. In 1888–89 he made a small group of grainstack pictures, including the three views of two stacks now in Saitama, at the Hill-Stead Museum and in a private collection. The Tel Aviv canvas is different in format, squarer than their wide 65 × 92 cm canvases, and in mood: a single stack in late autumn, with bare trees and the colors of turned earth. See our Giverny hub.

How it was painted

The handling is vigorous and loose, closer to a sketch than the carefully harmonized surfaces of 1890–91. Monet varied his strokes for each material: looping curves for the straw, short verticals for the trees, horizontal bands for the hills, rough scumbles for the stubble. The palette is earthy and warm, with rust and plum dominating, set against the pale stack and the cool sky. It records an overcast autumn day rather than a dramatic effect of sun.

How this version differs

Most of Monet's 1888–89 stack pictures pair two stacks against open hills. This canvas isolates a single stack and keeps the screen of trees from the mid-1880s meadow pictures such as the Pola Museum's Haystacks at Giverny. In that sense it bridges the earlier summer landscapes and the single-stack canvases of the Haystacks series, such as the Art Institute of Chicago's Stack of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset) or Kunsthaus Zürich's Grainstack in Sunlight.

Straw, grain and the farming year

The stacks Monet painted were not hay but sheaves of grain, wheat or perhaps oats, stacked after the July harvest and thatched with straw to keep them dry until the threshing machine came round, which could take until the following spring. That is why they stand in the fields through autumn and winter in his pictures. The loose, untidy straw of this stack, with its darker base, may show one partly built or partly dismantled, a glimpse of the agricultural work that the later, more monumental series largely leaves out.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which received it as an anonymous gift in 1973. In 2024 it anchored the museum's Impressionism exhibition To Catch a Fleeting Moment, together with the museum's Apple Trees in Bloom (1900) and Water Lily Pond (1919) by Monet. See also where to see Monet's paintings.