OIL PAINTING: Haystacks at Giverny, 1884
Monet often spoke of his radical abandonment of the traditional rules of painting; even he was astonished at the colours he was using. His most famous series of paintings are Rouen Cathedral, Haystacks and Water Lilies. In these works, Monet aimed to capture the changing light. This required him to work on several canvases at a time that corresponded to different times of the day and weather conditions. While it might seem from the spontaneous brushwork that Monet worked quickly, the process took weeks, months, even years. Monet joked that he would have to pay the landlord to remove all the green leaves from an oak tree so that he could finish a commission which he had begun the previous winter.