Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun)

Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) is a painting by Claude Monet, signed and dated "Claude Monet 91" at lower left. It shows two stacks of wheat standing in a snow-covered field near his house at Giverny, with a pale winter sun behind them throwing long blue shadows toward the viewer. The canvas, 65.4 by 92.1 centimeters, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession 29.100.109), part of the great bequest of Louisine Havemeyer in 1929. Wildenstein lists it as number 1279, under the title Meules, effet d'hiver.

What you're looking at

The stacks are set unusually: the larger one at left of center, the smaller just behind it to the right, as if we were walking past them. Both are rounded, slightly squat cones. Their sunlit tops and sides are made of short strokes of pink, peach, straw-yellow and blue, so that they look powdered rather than solid.

The shadows are the real subject. The sun sits low and behind the stacks, out of sight, so each stack throws a long, soft shadow down toward us. The shadow of the larger one is a broad shape of cornflower blue and lavender that reaches almost to the bottom edge; the smaller one's is a paler violet streak. These are the darkest areas in a picture that is otherwise almost all light.

Snow covers everything else. It is painted in white mixed with pink, lilac and cream, with a few flecks of yellow stubble showing through in the foreground. Behind the stacks, where a line of poplars and a farm would normally appear, there is only a band of blurred blue-violet vertical strokes, as if the trees were seen through frozen mist. Above, the sky is a pale, even rose.

Snow and sun: what makes this version distinct

Most of the winter canvases put the stacks against a clear background of houses and hills, as in Boston's Grainstack (Snow Effect) or the Getty's Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning. The Met picture dissolves the background almost completely. With the horizon gone, the stacks seem to float in a field of pink and white, held in place only by their shadows. It is one of the most nearly abstract canvases in the series.

The palette is also unusually narrow. Apart from the blue shadows, almost every color is a tint of white. Monet shows how strongly a low sun on snow can bleach a landscape, and how much color can still be found in it.

How it was painted

The winter of 1890–91 was long and cold, and Monet painted the stacks outdoors through weeks of snow and frost, working on several canvases at a time. He then refined them in his studio before showing them in May 1891. Here the paint is thick and dry, applied in small separate touches that let earlier layers show through. The background strokes are vertical, the snow strokes mostly horizontal, and the stacks' strokes follow their curves, so direction alone separates one zone from another.

The Havemeyers and the Met

Louisine and Henry Osborne Havemeyer were among the most important American collectors of Impressionism, advised by the painter Mary Cassatt. Louisine bequeathed much of their collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929, and this canvas came with it, along with other Monets. The Met also holds the Giverny footbridge picture Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies and a London view, The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog).

Details to look for

Look closely at the snow just in front of the large stack. Monet scatters small flecks of yellow and orange there, bits of straw or stubble showing through, and they make the white around them feel colder. The two shadows are not the same blue: the nearer one is deeper and more violet, the farther one lighter, which helps push the second stack back in space.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the nineteenth-century European paintings galleries (Gallery 819 at the time of writing). See Monet at the Met, our Haystacks series hub, Giverny and Claude Monet.