Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn)

Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn) is an oil painting by Claude Monet, made in 1890–91 and signed and dated "Claude Monet 91" at lower left. It shows two stacks of harvested wheat in the field beside his house at Giverny as the sun goes down on an autumn day. The canvas, 65.8 by 101 centimeters, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1933.444), which holds the largest group of Monet's stacks anywhere. Wildenstein's catalogue lists it as number 1270, Deux meules, déclin du jour, automne.

What you're looking at

Two stacks stand in an open field. The larger one, at right of center, is a broad cone with a rounded cap; the smaller, at far left, sits lower and further back, so that the pair reads as near and far. Both are painted in the same unexpected color: not straw-yellow but a dusky coral, warmed to orange where the last light catches their flanks and cooled to rose in their shadowed bases.

Behind them a band of trees and roofs runs across the middle of the picture. A few red-tiled houses peep out at the center, and a long blue-violet ridge of hills closes the view. Above, the sky is the most worked passage on the canvas. It grades from a cool, chalky green at upper left to a band of apricot and pink along the horizon at right, where the sun has just dropped. A small patch of acid green at the right edge, painted over the pink, catches the eye on a second look.

The field itself is a mesh of lilac, green and buff strokes. There are no hard shadows anywhere. At this hour the light comes almost level and from far off, so everything is bathed rather than modeled.

End of day, autumn: what makes this version distinct

The Art Institute's own reading of the series points out a structural difference between the seasons. In nearly all the autumn views, the tops of the stacks break the horizon and push up into the sky; in most of the winter views the stacks sit lower in the field, wrapped in bands of hill and ground. This canvas is a clear example of the autumn type: the peak of the large stack rises well above the ridge into the glowing band of sky, so the stack and the sunset become a single shape of warm color.

It also differs from Chicago's other autumn picture of the same pair, Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), which is a daytime view with long blue shadows and a pale yellow sky. Here the shadows have gone and the whole canvas has been pushed toward pink. Compared with the high-noon brightness of Grainstacks, in Bright Sunlight, the same two stacks seem almost to glow from inside.

How it was painted

Monet began the stacks in late summer 1890 and worked on them into the winter, often keeping several canvases going at once and switching from one to the next as the light changed. He wrote to the critic Gustave Geffroy in October 1890 that he was chasing "instantaneity," and that the effects he wanted came and went too quickly. Back in the studio he reworked the pictures, adjusting the color across a whole canvas so that each one holds together as a single harmony.

The surface here shows that process. The paint is dense and crusty, built up in many dry, small strokes laid over each other, especially in the sky and the stacks. Underlying colors show through the gaps, which is what gives the pinks their vibration.

The Stacks of Wheat series

In May 1891 Monet hung fifteen of these canvases together in one room at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and the exhibition was a critical and commercial success. The idea of showing many versions of one humble motif became the model for his later series of Poplars and Rouen Cathedral. Our Haystacks series hub gathers the canvases; for a winter sunset of the same field, see Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect), also in Chicago.

The museum's provenance research shows how fast the pictures sold. This one went from Monet to Durand-Ruel in July 1891 and on to the Chicago collector Potter Palmer, changed hands several times in the dealer's books, and eventually entered the collection of Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn, whose memorial bequest brought it to the Art Institute in 1933.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago's Impressionist galleries (Gallery 243 at the time of writing), often near several other stacks. See Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago for the museum's full holdings, Giverny for the place, and Claude Monet for his career.