Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Claude Monet
1890–91
The monumental stacks that Claude Monet depicted in his series Stacks of Wheat rose fifteen to twenty feet and stood just outside the artist’s farmhouse at Giverny. Through 1890 and 1891, he worked on this series both in the field, painting simultaneously at several easels, and in the studio, refining pictorial harmonies. In May 1891, Monet hung fifteen of these canvases next to each other in one small room in the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. An unprecedented critical and financial success, the exhibition marked a breakthrough in Monet’s career, as well as in the history of French art. In this view, and in nearly all of the autumn views in the series, the conical tops of the stacks break the horizon and push into the sky. But in most of the winter views, which constitute the core of the series, the stacks seem wrapped by bands of hill and field, as if bedded down for the season. For Monet, the stack was a resonant symbol of sustenance and survival. He followed this group with further series depicting poplars, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and, later, his own garden at Giverny. The Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s Stacks of Wheat in the world.
| Title | Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) |
|---|---|
| Artist | Claude Monet |
| Date | 1890–91 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Style | Impressionism |
| Dimensions | 60 × 100.5 cm (23 5/8 × 39 9/16 in.); Framed: 75.6 × 116.6 × 7.4 cm (29 3/4 × 45 7/8 × 2 7/8 in.) |
About Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a pioneer of the French artistic movement known as Impressionism. Throughout his long career, Monet portrayed the people closest to him and the places he knew best. He favored family and friends as models, often working and exhibiting alongside fellow artists. In the early years he painted the forests of Fountainbleau, Parisian boulevards, suburban villages along the Seine, seaside towns, and flowering fields, and later, after buying a house at Giverny northwest of Paris, stacks of wheat and water lilies. Monet was a proponent of plein air painting, working directly out-of-doors on compositions he would later revise and sometimes complete in his studio. He painted his beloved water lilies in Giverny, where he tended to a water garden and a small pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. Another favorite subject, meules (stacks of wheat sometimes referred to as “haystacks”), were for Monet a resonant symbol of sustenance and survival—constructed by humans but created by nature.
While Monet’s series paintings appear compositionally simple, the artist adapted his palette and brushwork to each temporal situation, conveying the complexity of color, light, and texture on each canvas. As he described, “One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all.” Only by working in series could Monet truly render, as he put it, “what I experience”—in other words, how he perceived and responded to these subjects, which were defined by light and air as time passed and the seasons changed.
The Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s stacks of wheat in the world. An online scholarly publication delves into the museum’s collection of Monet’s paintings and drawings.