The Young Ladies of Giverny, Sun Effect

The young ladies in the title are hay. Around Giverny the farmers used that word for the small provisional shelters they built in the field before making a proper stack, and in 1894 Monet walked out to the Ajoux plain, between his garden and the Seine, to paint them under a high sun. They throw almost no shadow, which puts the hour near midday. He was spending most of that year indoors, reworking the Rouen cathedral canvases he had begun in front of the building two years earlier, which is why every one of them carries the date 1894. In November Cézanne came to stay in the village. Monet painted these little shelters only three times. A collector left this one to the Bezalel museum in Jerusalem in 1961, and it passed to the Israel Museum when that opened a few years later.