Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise

Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise is a small, wide landscape Claude Monet painted in 1865 on the open plain outside the village of Chailly-en-Bière, at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. It shows two haystacks in a field at dawn. Painted twenty-five years before his famous Haystacks series, it is in the San Diego Museum of Art.

What you are looking at

The canvas is twice as wide as it is high, and almost two-thirds of it is sky. Near the top, the sky is a cool, milky blue-green, washed with white. Lower down it warms through cream and pale yellow to a band of glowing apricot along the horizon, where the sun is about to rise. Across this band float long, flat streaks of cloud in violet, mauve and dusky rose, lit from beneath; they stretch almost the full width of the picture and give it its horizontal rhythm.

The land is a dark, flat strip along the bottom. On the horizon a line of trees and the roofs of a village are silhouetted in brown and blue-black, with a church tower rising just left of center. In the field, still in shadow, stand two haystacks: a small one at left, partly lost against the village, and a larger one right of center, its rounded top catching a little of the coming light in reddish brown. The field itself is laid in with dark greens and olive, with a few lighter strokes where dew catches the light. The signature is at lower left.

The picture is about waiting. Nothing moves, the field is still in shadow, and the only change is in the sky, where the light grows second by second. Monet chose the brief interval before the sun appears, when the colors of the clouds are most intense and the land is still dark. Within a few minutes the scene he painted would have looked completely different, which is exactly why he painted it.

Where and when it was painted

Monet spent much of 1865 at Chailly, preparing his huge Déjeuner sur l'herbe in the forest nearby. When he stepped out of the woods he found the wide, flat Plaine de Bière, the farmland between Chailly and Barbizon that Jean-François Millet had made famous in pictures of peasants at work. Monet's view has no figures. It is purely a study of light at a particular hour, made on a canvas small enough to carry out before dawn. In the forest the same year he painted The Pavé de Chailly in the Forest of Fontainebleau and Le Pavé de Chailly.

How it was painted

The handling is thin and fluid in the sky, where Monet blended his colors smoothly to capture the gradual change from night to day, and thicker and darker in the land. The clouds are single, confident horizontal strokes of violet laid over the wet yellow ground, so their edges soften into it. The low horizon and the wide format let the sky dominate. The palette, with its violets and apricots, is already the palette of early-morning light he would return to again and again, most famously in Impression, Sunrise seven years later.

Before the series

It is tempting to read this canvas as a first draft of the Haystacks series of 1890–91, in which Monet painted the stacks near his house at Giverny at every hour and season, as in Haystacks, Snow Effect or Stacks of Wheat, Sunset, Snow Effect. The idea of a single, simple rural motif changed by light is already here. But in 1865 the haystacks are part of the landscape, not its subject; the subject is the sky. The difference shows how far Monet traveled in the next quarter-century, from recording a moment to building a whole series around variations of it.

Where to see it

The painting is in the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park (accession 1982.20). It is a rare chance to see an early Monet on the West Coast, together with LACMA's The Beach at Honfleur in Los Angeles. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.