Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago: Stacks of Wheat and More

Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the richest encounters with the painter in America: the museum holds more than thirty paintings by Claude Monet, about thirty-four by our catalogue's count, including six canvases from the Stacks of Wheat series, the largest group of them in any museum according to the Art Institute, along with The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867), Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), Étretat, Bordighera, London and Venice views, and late water lilies. Most hang together in the Impressionist galleries, where the main Monet room is Gallery 243.

The collection reflects the taste of Chicago collectors, led by Bertha Honoré Palmer, who bought Monet in quantity from the 1890s. This guide picks out what to see and gives practical notes for a visit.

How Chicago came to love Monet

Chicago discovered Monet early and bought him enthusiastically. The key figure was Bertha Honoré Palmer, wife of the hotelier and real-estate magnate Potter Palmer, who visited Paris in the 1890s and bought his paintings by the dozen, often from Durand-Ruel soon after they were finished. She bought Stacks of Wheat after the series exhibition at Durand-Ruel's Paris gallery in 1891, when many French collectors still found them strange. The Potter Palmer Collection came to the Art Institute in 1922.

Other Chicago collectors followed her lead, among them Martin A. Ryerson and Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn, whose bequests filled out the collection. The result is a group that covers almost every stage of Monet's career, with an unusual concentration on the series pictures of the 1890s. The museum's 1995 Monet retrospective was one of the most visited exhibitions in its history, and Monet remains one of the main reasons people visit.

What to see first: the Stacks of Wheat

The Art Institute owns six canvases from the series Monet painted in a field next to his house at Giverny in 1890–91. (The museum calls them Stacks of Wheat; they are also known in English as Haystacks or Grainstacks.) Seen together, they demonstrate exactly what the series was for: the same conical stacks, the same line of trees and hills, transformed by season, weather and time of day.

• Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) sets two stacks against a low sun, their shadows long and blue across the snow, the sky flaring orange and pink.
• Stack of Wheat (Snow Effect, Overcast Day) is cold and still: a single stack under heavy gray light, every color muted toward lilac and gray.
• Stack of Wheat is one of the best demonstrations of colored shadow: the stack's flank is not brown but blue, violet and rose.
• Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn) and Stack of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset) complete the group.

For the story of the whole series, see Monet's Haystacks.

Other highlights

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867). A gray summer day on the Normandy coast near Le Havre: fishing boats drawn up on the shingle, a few figures, a sky of moving cloud. It is a companion to the more famous terrace scene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). Probably one of the station pictures Monet showed at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, with a locomotive pulling in under the glass roof in clouds of steam. At the time of writing the museum's website listed it as not on view, so check before going specially for it.

The Cliff Walk at Pourville (1882). Two young women, probably Alice Hoschedé's daughters, stand on a windy clifftop above a turquoise sea dotted with sails. Monet paints the grass as a mass of short, flickering strokes that seem to move in the wind.

Étretat. The Departure of the Boats, Étretat and Boats on the Beach at Étretat (both 1885) show the fishing fleet of the Normandy village below its famous cliffs; see Étretat and the Normandy coast.

Bordighera (1884). Twisted pines frame the old town on its hill and a blue Mediterranean, a picture from Monet's first southern campaign.

Argenteuil and the Seine. On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868), a woman, probably Camille, seated in the shade by the river, with a village reflected in the water, is one of the first pictures in which Monet broke the reflections into separate patches of color. The Artist's House at Argenteuil (1873) shows his son Jean with a hoop in the garden of the family home.

The later series. The museum also has Water Lilies of 1906 and later water-lily ponds, Irises (1914–17), a Houses of Parliament, a Charing Cross Bridge and two Waterloo Bridges from London, two views of Vétheuil from 1901, Venice, Palazzo Dario (1908), a Poppy Field from Giverny and a picture from his 1895 trip to Norway.

Where the Monets hang

At the time of writing, the Art Institute's online collection lists most of its Monet paintings as on view in Gallery 243, which holds the Stacks of Wheat, the London, Vétheuil and Venice pictures and the water lilies. Earlier works hang nearby: the Étretat, Pourville, Belle-Île and Bordighera pictures in Gallery 240, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt and The Artist's House at Argenteuil in Gallery 201, and The Beach at Sainte-Adresse in Gallery 225. Gallery numbers and displays change, so check each painting's page on artic.edu before your visit.

Practical notes

• Where: 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, beside Millennium Park; the Modern Wing has a second entrance on Monroe Street.
• Opening times (from the museum's website): Monday, Wednesday and Friday to Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm; Thursday, 11 am to 8 pm; closed on Tuesdays. The first hour of each open day, 10 to 11 am, is reserved for members. Check the website for holiday hours.
• Route: the Impressionist galleries are on the second floor of the museum's main building, reached by the Grand Staircase from the Michigan Avenue entrance.
• Time: an hour covers the Monets and their neighbors, including Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day and Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which are among the museum's most visited works.

Beyond Chicago

For more Monets in the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have collections of comparable size. For the full list, see where to see Monet's paintings.