Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), Claude Monet, 1891. Oil on canvas, 60 × 100 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Art Institute of Chicago replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Impressionism
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Claude Monet · 1891
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 60 × 100 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Licence
- Public domain (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0)
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Claude Monet
Monet gave Impressionism its name by accident, with a painting called Impression, Sunrise that a hostile critic used as a stick to beat the whole group in 1874. He spent the next fifty years pursuing one idea with more discipline than anyone else of his generation: that a painting records a specific light at a specific moment, and that the way to prove it is to paint the same subject repeatedly under different conditions. Hence the series — the stacks of wheat, the poplars, Rouen cathedral, the Thames, and finally the water lilies, which occupied him for the last twenty-five years of his life.
Nearby
Related works
Impression, Sunrise
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Water Lilies
Art Institute of Chicago
What to look at
They are not haystacks. They are stacks of harvested wheat, built in the fields near Monet's house at Giverny and left standing until threshing, and he painted twenty-five of them across one autumn and winter. This is an early one, with the stubble still warm and the light low and long. The composition is almost nothing: two stacks, a band of field, a band of distant trees and hills, a strip of sky. What makes it work is that the shadows are not grey. The shadow side of the large stack is violet and blue-green, and the shadow it casts across the stubble is the same violet laid over orange, so the darkest part of the picture is also one of its most colourful. Monet exhibited fifteen of the series together in 1891 and they sold almost immediately; it was the show that made him financially secure.