Grainstack (Sunset)

In March 1905 the Copley Society hung 95 paintings by Monet in Copley Hall in Boston, together with 11 sculptures by Rodin. Collectors from Boston, New York and Chicago lent them. This canvas was number 66 in the catalogue, Haystack at Sunset, sent from New York by James Sutton. The catalogue essay was written by Desmond FitzGerald, a Boston engineer who collected Monet himself and lent several pictures to the show. He suggested that the haystack paintings might be called symphonies in rose and purple, and he guessed there were perhaps 20 of them in existence. Monet signed this one at the lower left and dated it 91. After Sutton's death his collection was auctioned in New York in January 1917, and later that year Robert J. Edwards of Boston bought the picture from the dealer Durand-Ruel. Edwards died in 1924, and in 1925 the canvas came to the Museum of Fine Arts with his bequest.