Haystacks

The most famous haystacks in French painting are Claude Monet's. Between the end of summer 1890 and February 1891 he painted about 25 canvases of the stacks in a field near his house at Giverny, and on 4 May 1891 he hung 15 of them side by side at the Paris gallery of his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Seurat made this small oil on a wooden panel about eight years before any of them, around 1882, when he was in his early twenties and painting in the farmland outside Paris. He did not live to see Monet's room of grainstacks. Seurat died suddenly on 29 March 1891, five weeks before that exhibition opened.