Stack of Wheat

By 1890, Monet had rented the same pink farmhouse at Giverny for seven years, and that autumn he finally bought it outright. The field of grain stacks he turned to stood just beyond his own garden. Each stack held the year's harvested wheat, piled 15 to 20 feet high and left standing through the seasons until it could be threshed. Monet worked several canvases at once, moving from one to the next as the light shifted, chasing an effect that held for only a few minutes. He carried more than 20 of these through 1890 and 1891. When 15 of the stacks went on show in Paris in the spring of 1891, they sold almost at once.