Haystacks at Giverny 1895

Claude Monet

Haystacks is the common English title for a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The principle subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat (or possibly barley or oats: the original French title, Les Meules à Giverny, simply means The Stacks at Giverny). The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series (Wildenstein Index Numbers 1266-1290) which Monet began near the end of the summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring though Monet also produced earlier paintings using this same stack subject.

The stacks belonged to Monet's farmer-neighbour, Monsieur Quéruel. Noticing the way the light changed on M. Quéruel's stacks, Monet asked his stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé, to bring him two canvases, one for sunny and one for overcast conditions.[15] But Monet soon found he could not catch the ever-changing light and mood on merely two canvases: as a result, his willing helper was quickly bringing as many canvases as her wheelbarrow could hold.[16] Monet's daily routine therefore came to involve carting paints, easels and many unfinished canvases back and forth, working on whichever canvas most closely resembled the scene of the moment as the conditions and light fluctuated. Although he began painting the stacks en plein air, Monet later revised his initial impressions in his studio, both to generate contrast and to preserve the harmony within the series.[17]


Monet produced numerous Haystacks paintings. He painted five paintings (Wildenstein Index Numbers 1213-1217) with stacks as his primary subject during the 1888 harvest.[18] His earlier landscapes (Wildenstein Index Number 900-995, 1073) had included stacks [and also some more-accurately described hayricks: that is smaller piles of hay for animal-feed] in an ancillary manner. The general consensus is that only the canvases produced using the 1890 harvest (Wildenstein Index Number 1266-1290) comprise the Haystacks series proper. However some commentators include additional paintings when referencing this series. For example, the Hill-Stead Museum talk of their two stack paintings even though one is from the 'proper' 1890 harvest, the other from the 1888 harvest.[6]


Monet's Haystacks series is one of his earliest to rely on repetition to illustrate nuances in his perception across natural variations such as times of day, seasons, and types of weather. For Monet, the concept of producing and exhibiting a series of paintings related by subject and vantage point began in 1889, with at least ten paintings done at the Valley of the Creuse, and subsequently shown at the Galerie Georges Petit.[19] This interest in the serial motif would continue for the rest of his career.