Grainstacks, in Bright Sunlight

Grainstacks, in Bright Sunlight (Meules, grand soleil) is a painting by Claude Monet, signed and dated "Claude Monet 90" at lower left. It shows two stacks of wheat in the field beside his house at Giverny on a brilliant summer day. The canvas measures about 64 by 91 centimeters and is in the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, the house-museum built for the industrialist Alfred Atmore Pope and his family. Wildenstein's catalogue lists it as number 1267.

What you're looking at

The composition is the one Monet used for several of the late-summer canvases: a big stack right of center and a smaller one at left, set on a stubbled field with a line of trees, roofs and hills behind. What sets this version apart is the direction and strength of the light. The sun is high and slightly behind the stacks, so their fronts are in shade and the outlines blaze. Monet draws each contour with a broken rim of hot orange, as if the straw at the edges were catching fire.

The shadows fall toward us. Under the left stack a dark, blue-green pool spreads across the ground; under the large stack a broad wedge of cobalt and violet runs off to the right. Between them, the stubble is painted in near-white, cream, pink and pale green, so bright that it seems bleached.

The background reads like a heat haze. A row of yellow-green trees, painted in short vertical dabs, stands in front of a long band of blue hills, and at right a group of blue-roofed farm buildings dissolves into the same blue. The sky is almost colorless: a thick, creamy white with faint lilac, laid on with a loaded brush.

Bright sunlight: what makes this version distinct

Most canvases in the series are about low light: sunrise, sunset, frost, snow. This is one of the few that confronts the full glare of a summer day. Compare it with the Musée d'Orsay's Haystacks, End of Summer, which shows the same pair from almost the same spot in a softer, hazier light, and with Chicago's Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), where the sun is lower and the shadows longer. Here the contrast is at its strongest: dark, cool bodies against a field that is nearly white.

The date also matters. Signed "90," this canvas belongs to the first, summer phase of the campaign, before the winter pictures that make up the core of the series. It shows Monet still working with the warm palette and strong cast shadows of a summer day, before frost and snow pushed him toward the pale pinks and blues of Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun).

How it was painted

The stacks stood in a field just outside Monet's property, which he bought in November 1890. He painted outdoors on several canvases at a time, swapping them as the light moved, and then refined them in the studio. The texture here is heavy: the sky is a thick crust of dry paint, and the stacks are built from short, overlapping strokes of mauve, rust and blue, with the orange rims added on top. Monet liked such rough surfaces because they broke the light, and he sometimes reworked a canvas until the paint was several layers deep.

Alfred Pope and Hill-Stead

Alfred Atmore Pope, a Cleveland iron manufacturer, was one of the earliest American collectors of Monet. Hill-Stead's own history records that he bought this canvas from the Paris dealer Boussod, Valadon et Cie, and that he acquired three paintings from the stacks series in all; an earlier, pre-series picture, Grainstacks, White Frost Effect, is also at Hill-Stead. The paintings were hung in the family's rooms rather than a gallery, and a 1910 photograph shows this one in the dining room. The house, designed with Pope's daughter Theodate Pope Riddle, opened as a museum after her death, with the collection left in place.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, near Hartford, in the domestic setting the Popes gave it. Our Haystacks series hub lists the other versions, Where to See Monet covers smaller collections like this one, and Giverny describes the fields where the stacks stood. For the painter's life, see Claude Monet.