Covone a Giverny

When Monet set up before a hay stack near his house at Giverny in 1886, he had no series in mind. That came four years later, when he painted the same kind of stack more than 25 times to follow the light across a whole autumn and winter. This canvas is the first stirring of the idea. He caught a grey, blustery day with the horizon just beginning to brighten, working fast to hold a moment of weather that was already changing. He had moved his family out to Giverny, a village on the edge of Normandy, only three years before, and the stacks in the nearby fields were simply what stood outside his door. Here the stack still shares the picture with the sky and the far hills, not yet the lone subject it would become.