Meadow with Haystacks near Giverny

In the summer of 1889 a Boston painter named Lilla Cabot Perry rented a house at Giverny, and for some seasons she lived right next door to Monet, who would sometimes stroll over after lunch and smoke a cigarette in her garden. She went back for nine summers in all, and at home in Boston she kept telling her friends to buy his pictures. She also bought for her own family. By 1899 she had found this canvas for her brother, Arthur Tracy Cabot, a Boston surgeon, and that February he lent it to a Monet exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. Monet had painted it in 1885, four years before she first came to the village, in the meadows around Giverny. Most of the picture is blue, green and violet, and the eye goes straight to the streaks of yellow, sunlight breaking through the trees on the right. It came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1942, under Cabot's will.