Claude Monet Paintings 1840
- 1926
French Prominent Impressionist Painter
Haystack at Giverny, 1886
Oil on canvas
The Hermitage
Landscapes
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OIL PAINTING: Haystack at Giverny, 1886
In the fall of 1890, Impressionist Claude Monet arranged to have the wheatstacks near his home left out over the winter. By the following summer Monet had painted them at least thirty times, at different times throughout the seasons. Wheatstacks was Monet's first series and the first in which he concentrated on a single subject, differentiating paintings only by color, touch, composition, and lighting and weather conditions. Monet said, "For me a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; but it lives by virtue of its surroundings, the air and the light which vary continually."
After beginning outdoors, Monet reworked each painting in his studio to create the color harmonies that unify each painting. The pinks in the sky echo the snow's reflections, and the blues of the wheatstacks' shadows are found in the wintry light shining on the stacks, in the houses' roofs, or in the snowy earth.
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