Haystacks, Snow Effect

Haystacks, Snow Effect is one of Claude Monet's winter canvases from his series of stacks of wheat, painted in the fields beside his house at Giverny in 1890–91. Signed and dated "91" at lower left, it measures 65 by 92 centimeters and is number 1277 in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue. It belongs to the National Galleries of Scotland (NG 2283), entered the collection in 1965 and hangs in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Our catalogue has also listed it as Haystack, Effect of White Frost.

What does Haystacks, Snow Effect show?

Two stacks stand in a snow-covered field. The larger one fills the center of the canvas, a squat drum topped by a steep cone; the smaller sits behind it to the left, partly hidden. Both are seen against the light, so the sides facing us are in shadow: deep plum, rust and blue-black, with flecks of cobalt and pale blue on the upper slopes where the snow on the thatch catches the sky.

The sun is low and behind them, somewhere in the haze at the top of the canvas. That is why their shadows run straight toward us. The large stack's shadow spills down to the bottom edge as a pool of brilliant ultramarine, the most saturated passage in the picture, and the small stack throws a second, lighter blue shape to the left.

Behind the stacks, the landscape almost dissolves. A low rise of snowy ground, a few trees and the line of the hills are reduced to drifts of white, lilac and pale blue, and the sky above is a band of peach and gold. Only near the lower right do a few ochre flecks of stubble break through the snow, reminding you this is a harvested field.

Look closely at the snow

Nothing here is painted white. The sunlit snow in the foreground is built of pink, cream, yellow and lilac strokes laid side by side, while the shadowed snow is blue and violet. Near the stacks, Monet drags warm orange into the edges of the shadows, where reflected light from the straw would fall.

The paint is thick and crusted, worked over many sessions. Strokes run horizontally across the field, curve around the stacks and break into short dabs in the misty background. Up close, the large stack's surface is a weave of red, blue and violet; from across the room it reads as a single dark mass with a glowing outline.

How Monet painted the stacks

Monet had bought his house at Giverny in November 1890, and the stacks stood in a field close by. From late summer 1890 into the winter he painted them over and over, setting up several canvases at once and switching to another as the light changed. In a letter to the critic Gustave Geffroy that October he wrote that he was struggling to capture what he called "instantaneity."

The snow effects come from the hard winter of 1890–91, when frost and snow lay for weeks. Like most canvases in the series, this one was finished in the studio, where Monet adjusted colors so that the pictures would hang well together.

How this version fits the Haystacks series

The full series runs to about twenty-five canvases, and fifteen of them were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1891, where they sold within days. Their success made the series Monet's working method, from the Poplars to Rouen Cathedral. Our Haystacks series hub gathers the versions in the catalogue.

Among the snow pictures, this is one of the most backlit. Compare the single, sidelit stack of Grainstack (Snow Effect) in Boston, the flat gray light of Stack of Wheat, Snow Effect, Overcast Day and the orange afterglow of Stacks of Wheat, Sunset, Snow Effect, both in Chicago. The same field in late summer appears in Grainstack in Sunlight in Zurich.

Where to see Haystacks, Snow Effect

The painting hangs in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound in Edinburgh. The gallery also owns one of the 1891 canvases of Poplars on the Epte, so two of Monet's series can be seen side by side. For the setting of both, see our page on Monet's Giverny; for other collections, our guide on where to see Monet's paintings; and for his life, Claude Monet.