ジヴェルニー近郊の干し草の山

Monet had just moved to Giverny when he painted this in 1884, and a single haystack in a neighbour's field already caught his eye. This is not yet one of the famous Haystacks, those come six years later, when he would paint the same stack around 25 times to track the light hour by hour. Here it is a single canvas, an early hint of the obsession to come. Its later life is a story of its own. The Moscow collector Ivan Morozov bought it in 1907 for 10,000 francs, and after the 1917 revolution his whole collection was seized by the new Soviet state. The painting passed through a museum of modern Western art that the government later shut, and in 1948 it came to the Pushkin, where it hangs now.