Haystacks

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The great French artist and one of the pioneers of the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet was born on this day in 1840. To mark this occasion, we just had to present one of his paintings :)

The year 1890 was a watershed moment in Claude Monet’s life— he had turned fifty and bought property for the first time. It was also the year that Monet painted the most definitive artistic series of the nineteenth century—his Haystacks. This acclaimed series found its inspiration in the fields adjacent to his home in Giverny.

A thresher was not available in every village at the time and the wait for a traveling machine to reach a specific location often took months. The grain cut in the summer would often sit in neat and careful stacks until January or February of the following year. These stacks were often between ten feet (ca. 3 meters) and twenty feet (ca. 6 meters) in height and their shapes varied by the region. The blond monoliths in Monet’s canvases possess the typical shape of the grain stacks in the Normandy countryside - a cylindrical base topped with a peaked dome, which lay all around him in the idyllic fields of Giverny.

This particular painting is one of the most glorious and effusive works from the Haystacks series. In May 2019 Sotheby's sold it for an astonishing $110,747,000. It is the highest price ever paid for a Monet painting.

$110 million. Hmm. See you tomorrow!

If you fell in love with Monet's Haystacks, here's more!