Almiares, efecto de nieve, mañana

In November 1890 Monet bought the house at Giverny he had been renting for seven years, and that autumn he arranged for the wheatstacks in the field beside it to be left standing instead of threshed. They stood there all winter, and he went out to them carrying several canvases at once, changing from one to the next as the light moved. This is one of the morning pictures, the field still under snow. Durand-Ruel hung 15 of the stacks in Paris in May 1891 and most of them sold within days at three to four thousand francs apiece. Two years later Monet bought the strip of land across the road and the railway line below his garden and started digging the lily pond.