Haystack at Giverny

What you are looking at

A single haystack sits in the lower left of the picture, a rounded mound of straw painted in yellows, ochres and soft greens, with a small shadow pooling at its base. Behind it a field runs across the canvas, its surface flecked with red and pink: poppies, or the warm color of a summer meadow seen in raking light. Beyond the field a line of farm buildings with pale walls and red-brown roofs sits among dark green trees, and further back the land falls away into a wide, hazy valley, layered in blue-green, before rising to a long line of low hills.

The sky takes up nearly a third of the canvas. It is pale and streaky, washed with pink and gray, and a few darker clouds gather along the horizon. The feeling is of a summer afternoon when the weather is about to change: wind moving through the grass, light still on the field, clouds coming up behind.

Where and when it was painted

Monet painted this in 1886, three years after settling at Giverny, in the fields around the village. The farmhouses are those of the hamlet just outside his garden, and the view looks out across the Seine valley. He had painted almost the same view a year earlier as a poppy field without a haystack; here he revisits it with the stack added in the foreground.

Haystacks were a common sight in the meadows around Giverny, and Monet painted about twenty canvases with stacks in the 1880s, including Haystacks at Giverny in the Pushkin Museum. In all of these the stack is one element in a landscape. Only from 1890 did he make the stacks themselves the subject, in the famous Haystacks (Grainstacks) series, where a single motif is repeated under different light and seasons.

How it was painted

The composition is simple and slightly off balance. The haystack sits low and to the left, the buildings run in a horizontal band across the middle, and there is nothing to hold the right side except the field and the distance. That emptiness gives the picture its sense of open country.

The field is painted with short, horizontal dabs of red, pink, orange and green laid over one another, so the color shimmers rather than sitting flat. The haystack is built from curved strokes that follow its form, the light side yellow and the shadow side green and lilac rather than brown. Monet uses the same pinks in the sky and in the field, which ties the top and bottom of the canvas together. The far valley is a soft blue haze, painted thinly, so the eye travels quickly from the textured foreground into the distance.

Toward the series

Compare this with Grainstack in Sunlight or Haystack in the Snow, Morning of 1890–91 and the change is clear. In the series, the stacks are large and close, the background shrinks to a strip, and the subject becomes the light itself. In 1886 the haystack is still a farm object in a landscape, painted with the same loose attention as the trees and houses. Monet's interest in a single motif repeated in changing conditions was already growing, as his work at Étretat in these years shows, but he had not yet applied it to the fields at his door.

There is also a practical difference. The 1886 canvas was painted in a single summer campaign on the spot, probably in a few sessions. The series pictures were begun outdoors, often on several canvases at once as the light changed, and then reworked at length in the studio so that they would hang together as a group. Haystack at Giverny shows the earlier, more direct way of working.

Where to see it

The painting is in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (ГЭ-6563), which it entered in 1931 from the Moscow collections of modern French art formed before the Revolution. The Hermitage displays its Impressionist holdings in the General Staff Building. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.