Grainstacks

In May 1891 Monet showed 15 of his grainstack pictures together at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris, and they sold quickly. This one, painted in 1890 but signed and dated 91, went to the dealer that July. By March 1892 it was in Chicago with Bertha Palmer, wife of the hotel owner Potter Palmer, who had seen the series in Paris and would end up owning nine of the grainstacks. That April it went instead to William Van Horne, head of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Montreal, and by November it was back with the Palmers, whose family kept it until 1986. The stacks stood in a field near Monet's house at Giverny. Here the sun sits low behind them, and the Museum Barberini points to the backlit glow, the unusually intense colour and the steep diagonal as echoes of Japanese woodblock prints. In May 2019 it sold at Sotheby's in New York for 110.7 million dollars, the first Impressionist painting to pass 100 million at auction.