Haystacks Overcast Day

Haystacks Overcast Day: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - Haystacks Overcast Day

Work Overview: Haystacks at Giverny
Claude Monet
Date: 1884
Style: Impressionism
Genre: landscape

Monet settled in Giverny in 1883. Most of his paintings from 1883 until his death 40 years later were of scenes within 3 kilometres (2 mi) of his home. Monet was intensely aware of and fascinated by the visual nuances of the region’s landscape and by the endless variations in the days and in the seasons - the stacks were just outside his door.[10]

Monet had previously painted a subject in different light and different moods. However, as he matured as a painter, his depictions of atmospheric influences were increasingly concerned not only with specific effects but with the overall color harmonies that allowed him an autonomous use of rich color.[11] The conventional wisdom was that the compact, solid, stacks were both a simple subject and an unimaginative one. However, contemporary writers and friends of the artist noted that Monet's subject matter was always carefully chosen, the product of careful thought and analysis.[12] Monet undertook to capture the stacks in direct light and then to re-examine them from the same view-point in different, often more muted, light and atmospheric conditions. It was then not unusual for Monet, in search of harmonious transitions within the series, to alter the canvases back in his studio.

The stacks depicted in the series are commonly referred to in English as hay, wheat or grain-stacks. In reality they stored sheafs of grain for bread - so wheat [or possibly barley or oats] - and not hay, an animal food. The 10-to-20-foot (3.0 to 6.1 m) stacks were a way of keeping the sheafs dry until the grain could be separated from the stalks by threshing.[14] The local method of storing and drying unthreshed-grains was to use wheat-straw, or sometimes hay, as a thatched 'roof' for the stack, shielding the wheat, barley or oats from the elements until, once dry-enough, they could be threshed. The threshing machines then traveled from village to village. Thus, although the grain was harvested [and the stacks were built] in July, it often took until March for all the farms to be reached by the machines. Grain storage/drying-stacks like these became common throughout Europe in the 19th century and survived until the inception of combine harvesters. Although the shapes of stacks were regional, in Normandy, where Giverny is situated, it was common for them to be round with quite steeply-pitched thatched 'roofs' - just as Monet painted.

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Claude Monet

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