“In Monet’s increasingly urbanized world, such stacks had become postcard symbols of agricultural bounty as a blessing. Determined with his grainstack paintings to go beyond the brilliantly exacting transcription of visual sensations at the heart of Impressionist landscape painting, Monet explained the challenge to his art critic friend, Gustave Geffroy in October 1890: “… the further I go, the more I see that a lot of work is needed to get at what I am looking for: instantaneity, above all the envelope, the same light suffused everywhere. ” Although the colors blend into an opalescent haze at a distance, up close Monet’s Meule features hundreds of short staccato brushstrokes aligned as waves of colored light, layers of one color raking across previously applied layers to capture the pulse of light as a life force. It was Monet’s obsession to capture the scintillating play of light that prompted Paul Cézanne’s comment: “Monet is only an eye. But what an eye!”

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“The artist had only to walk out of his house in rural Giverny to find his motif. Setting up his easel near the boundary wall of his garden, he looked west or southwest across the field known as the Clos Morin towards the hills on the far bank of the Seine. There, following the harvest, local farmers piled hundreds of sheaves of bound wheat stalks into tightly packed stacks with thatched conical roofs. These grainstacks represented the fruits of the local farmers’ labours and their hopes for the future.”

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Tag: Claude Monet At Sunnyside

Claude Monet at Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

List of Paintings by Claude Monet at wikiwand

Works by Claude Monet at Museum Barberini

Claude Monet at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Claude Monet at National Gallery of Art

Claude Monet at Art Institute of Chicago

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Christie’s: One of the last of Monet’s momentous Grainstack series in private hands

Claude Monet at wikiwand

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~Sunnyside