Haystacks (Ohara Museum, 1885)

Haystacks in the Ohara Museum of Art is a summer landscape Claude Monet painted at Giverny in 1885, five years before his famous series. A large grainstack stands at right with two small figures resting in its shade, a smaller stack sits in the sunny field at left, and a row of tall poplars runs across the background under a blue sky with drifting cloud. It belongs to the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, Japan's first museum devoted to Western art.

What you are looking at

The canvas is about 65 by 82 cm. The big stack, right of center, is a softly rounded cone painted in mauve, gold and gray-green, its top lit by the sun, its body in shadow. At its foot, in the cool shade on its left side, two figures sit or lie in the grass: one in a pale dress and a broad hat, another, darker, next to her. They are painted with just a few strokes, but they turn the scene into a summer afternoon of rest after work in the fields.

At left, much further back, a small stack catches full sun and glows orange. Between the two runs a band of bright, yellow-green meadow, crossed by a broad shadow in the foreground that stretches from left to right. Behind, the poplars and other trees form a high, broken wall of green and blue, with glimpses of hills between them. The sky is a lively mix of white cloud and patches of blue. The signature is at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet moved to Giverny, a village on the Seine about 75 km northwest of Paris, in April 1883, with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family of eight children. The meadows around the house, flat land between the village and the river Epte, became his everyday painting ground. In the summers of 1884 to 1886 he painted several pictures of the tall, round grainstacks the local farmers built after the harvest, each with its pointed thatch. They were scenes of summer meadows with poplars and figures, not yet the concentrated studies of light that the Haystacks series of 1890–91 would become. Our Giverny hub covers the place and its gardens.

How it was painted

Monet painted in the meadow, using short, feathery strokes that make the grass and leaves tremble. The shadow areas are full of color: the stack's shaded side is mauve and green rather than brown, and the shadow on the meadow is blue-green. The figures are placed in that shade, so that the eye finds them only after it has taken in the stack. Compared with the later series, the handling is lighter and more varied, and the picture is about the pleasures of the place as much as about light.

How this version differs

Among the 1884–86 meadow pictures, this one gives figures the greatest presence. In the Pola Museum's Haystacks at Giverny of 1884 there are no people; in the privately owned Haystacks at Giverny of 1885, figures with a red parasol stand at the left edge. The MFA Boston's Meadow with Haystacks of the same year shows the stacks pushed to the edge of a long, shadowed meadow. In the Haystacks series of 1890–91, Monet would remove both the figures and the trees.

Japan and Monet

The Ohara Museum was founded in 1930 by the Kurashiki industrialist Magosaburo Ohara, largely on the basis of Western paintings bought in Europe in the 1920s by his friend, the painter Torajiro Kojima. It holds an important group of Impressionist works, and its garden includes water lilies descended from plants at Giverny. This Haystacks is one of its best-known pictures.

The stacks before the series

Comparing this canvas with the 1890–91 Haystacks shows how far Monet's idea developed in five years. Here the stack is one element in a landscape, sharing the picture with trees, sky and people. In the series, the stack becomes a monumental single form, almost a building, and the subject shifts from the place to the light falling on it. This summer picture shows where that idea began.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Ohara Museum of Art, in the historic Bikan quarter of Kurashiki. See also where to see Monet's paintings.