Haystacks: Snow Effect

These are not haystacks but grainstacks, stacks of harvested wheat, standing in a field a short walk west of Monet's house at Giverny. Through the winter of 1890 into 1891 he painted them over and over, carrying out a stack of canvases and switching from one to the next as the light and weather shifted, sometimes within minutes. This is the snow campaign, the stubble buried and the low sun throwing long blue shadows across it against the warm orange of the straw. It was the first time Monet worked a single motif as a true series. In May 1891 his dealer Durand-Ruel hung 15 of the grainstacks in Paris, and they sold within days, some for as much as 1,000 francs, enough to leave him secure for the first time in his life.