Meules (Grainstacks), 1890

Meules (Grainstacks) is one of the twenty-five canvases of Claude Monet's Haystacks series, painted at Giverny in 1890 and signed and dated Claude Monet 91 at lower left. It shows two great stacks seen against the light: the nearer one looms at left, cut by the edge of the canvas, its shadowed side glowing violet and red, while a low sun blazes yellow behind the second stack and floods the sky with orange and pink. On 14 May 2019 it sold at Sotheby's New York for $110.7 million, then the highest price ever paid for a Monet. The buyer, the software entrepreneur Hasso Plattner, placed it in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

What you are looking at

The canvas is 73 by 92.5 cm. The composition is daringly asymmetrical. The nearer stack fills the left half, so close that its peak rises almost to the top edge and its left side is cut off. It is seen in shadow, built from dense strokes of crimson, plum, violet and blue, with a thin rim of fiery orange where the sun catches its edge. A second, smaller stack stands just behind it to the right, also in silhouette, its outline burning gold.

To the right, the sky opens up: an intense glow of lemon yellow just above the horizon, shading into peach, pink and pale turquoise. A few rounded trees on the horizon at right are touched with pink and green. The field in the foreground is a vivid mix of green, violet, orange and blue strokes, crossed by the long shadow of the stacks, which reaches toward us. The signature and date, Claude Monet 91, are written in the lower left.

Where and when it was painted

Monet began the Haystacks series at the end of summer 1890, painting the stacks in a field next to his house at Giverny, and continued through the winter into spring 1891. In October 1890 he wrote to the critic Gustave Geffroy that he was "struggling with a series of different effects", searching above all for "instantaneity" and the enveloppe, "the same light spread over everything". He worked on many canvases at once, switching as the light changed, and refined them in the studio. In May 1891 he showed fifteen of them together at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris; the show was a critical and commercial triumph and sold out within days. See our Giverny hub for the place.

How it was painted

This is one of the most intensely colored canvases in the series. Monet painted directly against the light, a difficult position: the stacks become dark masses, but he refused to paint them dark. Instead they are full of saturated reds, violets and blues, with warm orange outlines where the light wraps around them. The brushwork is dense and layered, especially in the sky, where many coats of color produce a glow rather than a flat tone. The tight crop and the sweep of the shadow give the picture an energy unlike the calmer, centered compositions.

The 2019 sale and after

The canvas had last appeared at auction in 1986, when it sold at Christie's for about $2.5 million. Its 2019 sale was the first time an Impressionist painting passed $100 million at auction. Plattner, co-founder of the software company SAP, had founded the Museum Barberini in 2017 to show his collection of Impressionism, and the painting now hangs there alongside a large group of other Monets and works by his Impressionist contemporaries. In October 2022, climate activists threw mashed potatoes at it; it was behind glass and was not damaged.

How this version differs

Most of the series' sunset pictures center a single stack, like the Art Institute of Chicago's Stack of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset) or the MFA's Grainstack (Sunset). This canvas instead crowds two stacks into the left half and gives the right half to the sky. It is closest in composition to the Art Institute's Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), but its light is far more dramatic. The Barberini also owns a snow canvas from the series, Grainstack in the Sunlight, Snow Effect.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum Barberini on the Alter Markt in Potsdam, near Berlin, as part of Impressionism: The Hasso Plattner Collection (inv. MB-Mon-26). See also where to see Monet's paintings.