Grainstack in the Sunlight

In the lower left corner Monet signed this canvas and dated it 91, the year his pictures of grainstacks, the stacks of harvested grain in a field next to his house at Giverny, sold quickly at a show in Paris. This one travelled fast. By the early 1890s it belonged to Potter Palmer, a Chicago hotel owner, and in 1894 it went back to Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, who showed it in New York the following year and in Boston in 1907. Later it returned to France and passed through the hands of Paris dealers around the middle of the century. On 4 June 1990 it came up as lot 64 at a saleroom in Bayeux, a small Norman town, and six months later Christie's sold it in London. In November 2016 Christie's offered it again, in New York, where it fetched 81.4 million dollars, then the highest price a Monet had ever reached at auction.