Grainstacks, Snow Effect

Grainstacks, Snow Effect (Meules, effet de neige) is a painting by Claude Monet, signed and dated "Claude Monet 91" at lower left. It shows two stacks of wheat, their tops streaked with snow, standing in a white field near his house at Giverny on a cold, overcast day. The canvas is in the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont (inventory 27.1.2.106); museum data record it as 23 by 39 inches. Wildenstein lists it as number 1274.

What you're looking at

The arrangement is the familiar one: a smaller stack at left, a large one right of center. But the light is entirely different from the sunny canvases. There is no sun, no glow at the edges and almost no cast shadow. The stacks are dark, chocolate-brown masses, painted in deep red-brown with touches of violet and orange, and snow lies on their caps in thick, irregular streaks of white and blue-white, like icing that has started to slide.

Under the caps Monet marks the eaves with a dark line, and the drum of each stack is a solid, rounded block. Around the base of the large stack, a few patches of brown earth or straw show through the snow.

The rest of the canvas is a study in cold. The snow in the foreground is painted in white, gray, lilac and blue, flat and dull, with only faint pink in the distance. Behind the stacks, farm buildings with snow-covered roofs sit in a blur of gray-blue, and at right a bare tree rises as a smoky shape. A band of pale blue hills runs under a sky of heavy gray-mauve cloud, painted in broad horizontal strokes.

Overcast snow: what makes this version distinct

This is the cold twin of the Getty's Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning. The two canvases show the same two snow-capped stacks from nearly the same viewpoint, but the Getty picture is lit by a peach sunrise and this one by flat, gray daylight. Set side by side, they make Monet's point about the series as clearly as any pair: the stacks are the same, the weather changes everything.

The overcast light also gives the stacks a weight they lack in the sunlit pictures. With no glow to dissolve their edges, they sit in the field like solid objects, dark against white. A similar mood appears in Chicago's single-stack Stack of Wheat (Snow Effect, Overcast Day).

How it was painted

The winter of 1890–91 brought weeks of snow to Giverny, and Monet painted the stacks outdoors through it, working on several canvases at once and finishing them in the studio. Here the palette is restricted to browns, grays, blues and white, with the warm color concentrated in the stacks. The snow on the caps is laid on thickly with a loaded brush, so it stands up from the surface; the sky is dragged across in thinner, horizontal strokes.

The Havemeyers and Shelburne

The Shelburne Museum was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, daughter of Louisine and Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the New York collectors whose great bequest of Impressionist paintings went to the Metropolitan Museum. Electra inherited a group of pictures from her parents, including works by Monet, Manet, Degas and Mary Cassatt, and they are shown at Shelburne in rooms recreated from her Park Avenue apartment. This canvas is therefore a sibling, by family descent, of the Met's Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), another snowy stacks picture from the Havemeyer collection.

Details to look for

The dark eave line under each snow cap is drawn with a single stroke of deep brown, which makes the stacks look carefully built. Look at the snowy roofs of the farm behind, painted in the same white and blue as the stacks' caps, linking near and far.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Shelburne Museum, near Burlington, Vermont, in the building devoted to Electra Havemeyer Webb's collection; the museum is open seasonally, so check before visiting. See our Haystacks series hub, Where to See Monet, Giverny and Claude Monet.