Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · 1891
Two stacks of harvested wheat stand in a field outside Giverny on a winter morning, snow on the ground, low sun behind them turning the shadows blue and the sky pink and lilac. The subject could hardly be plainer, and that is the point. Monet painted these stacks in the field next to his house more than twenty five times over a single autumn and winter, at different hours and in different weather, and he came to treat the humble shapes as instruments for recording light.
Stand close and the painting breaks into thousands of small touches of colour laid over one another, pink over blue over cream; step back and they fuse into snow glowing in sunshine. Monet worked on several canvases at once, switching as the light changed, and his stepdaughter carried them out to the field in a wheelbarrow. Look at the long shadows thrown toward you across the snow and the way the stacks are outlined with a warm edge where the sun catches their tops. Nothing is drawn; everything is built from colour.
Monet showed fifteen of the stack paintings together in Paris in May eighteen ninety one, and they sold out within days, the first great commercial success of his career. The series idea, painting one subject over and over to catch time passing, became his method for the rest of his life, in the poplars, the cathedral at Rouen and finally the water lilies. The Getty acquired this canvas in nineteen ninety five. Notice how the far hedges and houses are barely more than a smudge; only the light mattered.
Did You Know? Monet paid the farmer who owned the field to delay carting the stacks away so that he could keep painting them through the winter.
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