Grainstack in the Sunlight

Grainstack in the Sunlight, catalogued in French simply as Meule (Grainstack), is a painting by Claude Monet signed and dated "91" at lower left. It shows one enormous stack of wheat in the field beside his house at Giverny, backlit by a low sun. The canvas measures about 73 by 92 centimeters. Wildenstein lists it as number 1290. It is one of the few stacks still in private hands, and it made headlines on November 16, 2016, when it sold at Christie's New York for $81.4 million with fees, at the time the highest price ever paid for a Monet at auction.

What you're looking at

The stack is enormous and pushed hard to the right. Its peak nearly touches the top edge and its right side runs off the canvas, so we see it as a looming mass rather than a tidy cone. The sun is low and behind it. Its top is dark green and blue, ringed by a thin halo of violet where light catches the straw; lower down the body turns rose and mauve, and at the base Monet lays a thick band of scarlet and vermilion, as if the stack were smoldering.

The left half of the picture is open. A violet field rolls back to a cluster of farm roofs, low and half hidden, and then to a ridge of trees in blue and lilac. Above, the sky is a blaze of yellow, peach and pink, darkening to gray-violet at the very top.

The foreground is a weave of blue, lilac, green and yellow strokes. There is no clear cast shadow: with the sun ahead of us, the stack's shade falls toward the viewer and is lost in the purple of the field.

Why this version is distinct

Most canvases in the series show the stacks whole, at a polite distance. Here Monet comes close and crops, making the stack a monument. The same move appears in Boston's Grainstack (Sunset), which also puts one huge stack at the right against a burning sky; the two are near-twins in format and mood. The cropping, the hot red base and the contrast between a dark mass and a glowing sky make this one of the most dramatic pictures in the group, far from the even daylight of Grainstack in Sunlight in Zurich.

How it was painted

Monet painted the stacks outdoors through the winter of 1890–91, moving between canvases as the light changed, and then worked on them in the studio. The surface here is thick and lively. The stack is built from long, curving strokes that follow the slope of the straw, crossed by short touches of contrasting color: green in the red, red in the violet. In the sky the paint is dragged in horizontal bands so that the colors blend at their edges, the way a sunset sky does.

The 2016 sale

Christie's offered Meule in its Impressionist and Modern evening sale in New York on November 16, 2016, with an estimate of about $45 million. After a bidding contest of about fourteen minutes, it sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a hammer price of $72.5 million, or $81.4 million with fees. That beat the previous record for Monet, set in 2008 by a water-lily painting. The record fell again in 2019, when another stacks canvas, Meules, sold at Sotheby's for $110.7 million. The prices are a measure of how rare these pictures now are on the market: most of the series has been in museums for decades.

Details to look for

At the far left, the farm roofs are only a few strokes of brown and rust, yet they give the stack its enormous scale: they are tiny next to it. Look at the very top of the stack, where the dark green cap meets the yellow sky. Monet outlines it with a thin seam of violet and blue, the cool edge that makes the sky's warmth glow even brighter.

Where to see it

The painting is in a private collection and is not on regular public view. Museum versions are listed in our Haystacks series hub and in Where to See Monet; for another backlit single stack, see La Meule. The field is described in Giverny, and the painter's life in Claude Monet.