Grainstack in Sunlight

What you are looking at

A huge stack of grain rises from the left half of the picture, so close and so tall that its top is cut off by the upper edge of the canvas. Its sides are a dense weave of red, orange, violet and blue strokes, and the thatched cap that should give it a shape is lost above the frame. In front of it, a long shadow stretches across the stubble field in cool blue, green and lilac, and the field beyond the shadow blazes in pink and gold. On the right, through a pale haze, the low walls and roofs of a farm and a line of trees float on the horizon. The sky is a warm, milky pink.

This is high summer, around midday or early afternoon, when the air shimmers with heat. Monet does not show the sun; he shows what it does to color. Even the shadow is full of light.

The detail that matters most is the cropping. In every other painting of the series the stack sits wholly within the picture, with sky above it. Only here is it cut off at the top, which makes it less an object than a block of color pressing against the frame.

Where and when it was painted

The grainstacks stood in the Clos Morin, a field west of Monet's house at Giverny where a local farmer built his stacks every year after the harvest. Monet began painting them in the late summer of 1890 and continued through the following winter, setting up several canvases at once and switching between them as the light changed. The series ran to about 25 canvases. Fifteen of them were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1891, and they sold at once, mostly to collectors in the United States.

This canvas was not ready for that show. Ernest Hoschedé, the estranged husband of Alice, died in the spring of 1891, and Monet's work was interrupted; he delivered this picture to Durand-Ruel only in July 1891. It is signed and dated "Claude Monet 91" at lower right. For the series as a whole, see the Haystacks series; for the village, Giverny: Monet's house and garden.

How it was painted

The canvas is a wide 60 by 100 centimeters. The paint is applied in thick, small, criss-crossing strokes, built up in layers over several sessions, so that the surface has a dry, crusty texture like the straw itself. Monet uses complementary pairs to make the light vibrate: orange and blue in the stack, pink and green in the field. The farm buildings are hardly more than violet rectangles dissolved in the haze.

Set it beside the winter canvases, such as Grainstack (Snow Effect) in Boston, Stacks of Wheat, Sunset, Snow Effect in Chicago or Haystacks, Snow Effect in Edinburgh, and the idea of the series becomes clear: the stack is a constant, and the subject is the changing envelope of light around it.

Kandinsky and the Moscow exhibition

In 1896 the painting was shown in an exhibition of French art in Moscow. The young Wassily Kandinsky saw it there and later wrote, in his memoir Reminiscences (1913), that he did not recognize the subject from the catalogue and at first felt that the object was missing from the picture, yet was gripped by the power of the color. He described it as a revelation that eventually helped lead him toward abstraction.

Ownership and where to see it

Durand-Ruel bought the picture in July 1891 and it later passed to the Paris collector Edmond Decap and the New York banker Alonzo Barton Hepburn. The Kunsthaus Zürich bought it in 1969 with funds from the Otto Meister bequest (inventory 1969/0007). Check the museum's website for whether it is on display. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.