Grainstacks at Giverny the Evening Sun

Monet had moved to the village of Giverny in 1883, and by the late 1880s he was painting the fields around his new home. This is one of the grainstacks that stood in those fields after the harvest, tall mounds of wheat left to weather through the seasons, seen here under a low evening sun. He made it around 1888, a year or two before he turned the very same stacks into the long series that made them famous. In 1890 and 1891 he would paint them again and again through changing light and weather, and show 15 of those together in Paris to real acclaim. This earlier canvas already has what drew him back: the plain shape of the stack holding the last warm light while the ground around it cools. It hangs now in the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, near Tokyo, one of a handful of Monets to have travelled that far east.