Grainstack (Snow Effect)

Monet sold this canvas to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, on 9 May 1891, the week his grainstack pictures went on show together in Paris. By 30 June Durand-Ruel had sold it on to Horatio Appleton Lamb of Boston, and it then stayed in the Lamb family for 79 years, until his daughters Aimée and Rosamond gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1970. The subject is a single stack of grain standing in snow, in a field near Monet's house at Giverny. For a long time pictures like this were read only as studies of light and weather, the stack a convenient shape to hang them on. The museum notes that scholars now take the stack itself seriously as well. In the Normandy countryside a stack like this was the harvest put by for the winter, a sign of the land's fertility, of a farmer's wealth and of a district doing well. Monet signed it at the lower left and added the year, 91.