Haystacks at Giverny

Claude Monet

The series is among Monet's most notable work. The largest Haystacks collections are held at the Musée d'Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, with other collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,[1][2] the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, [3] Paris' Musée de l'Orangerie, and in the Art Institute of Chicago, where six of the twenty-five Haystacks pieces in this series are housed.[4] Other museums that hold parts of this series include the Getty Center in Los Angeles,[5] the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut (which also has one of five from the earlier 1888-9 harvest),[6] the National Gallery of Scotland,[7] the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,[8] Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Shelburne Museum, Vermont.[9] Private collections hold the remaining Haystacks paintings.

Although the mundane subject was constant throughout the Haystack series, the underlying theme may be seen as the transience of light. This concept enabled Monet to use repetition to show nuances of perception as the time of day, the seasons and the weather changed. The almost unvarying subject provided the basis for him to compare changes of light and mood across his nuanced series.[20] The first paintings in the series were started in late September or early October 1890, and he continued producing these paintings for about seven months. These paintings made Monet the first painter to paint such a large quantity of pictures of the same subject matter differentiated by light, weather, atmosphere and perspective.