Covone al sole

By the autumn of 1890 Monet had stopped moving. He had settled at Giverny, money was finally coming in, and he fixed his attention on something entirely ordinary: the stacks of harvested grain standing in a field near his house, left there to be threshed through the winter. He painted them again and again, around 25 canvases in all, following the light on them as the hour and the weather shifted. He worked several canvases at once, turning from one to the next as the sun moved. This is one of the sunlit versions. When he showed 15 of them together in Paris in 1891, they sold quickly and made his name for good. What he was really painting stands plainly in front of you, a heap of grain in a farmer's field, dressed in whatever light that minute gave it.