Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

This is a landscape painted in oil on canvas, about two feet tall and a little over three feet wide. It shows huge stacks of harvested wheat standing in a field. The stacks were real. They rose fifteen to twenty feet and stood just outside Claude Monet's farmhouse at Giverny, in France. Look for the rounded, cone-shaped tops of the stacks. The painting is built from soft patches of colour, with pink and green especially strong. Around the stacks you can also find trees, bushes, hills and a building, all suggested rather than drawn in sharp detail.

Start with the tops of the stacks. In this view the pointed tops break the horizon line, which is the line where land meets sky, and push up into the sky. That makes the stacks feel tall and upright. Then let your eye move across the fields and hills around them, where the pinks and greens sit side by side. Finally, look for the trees, bushes and the building in the distance. Notice how they are made of loose touches of paint rather than clear outlines.

Monet painted his Stacks of Wheat series through 1890 and 1891. He worked in two places. Out in the field, he painted at several easels at once, moving between canvases. Back in the studio, he refined what he called the harmonies of the pictures, meaning how the colours work together. In May 1891, he hung fifteen of these canvases side by side in one small room at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. The exhibition was an unprecedented success, both with critics and in sales, and it marked a breakthrough in his career.

For Monet, the stack of wheat was a powerful symbol of sustenance and survival, of food stored up to last through the year. Most of the autumn views, like this one, show the stacks pushing into the sky. In the winter views, which are the heart of the series, the stacks seem wrapped in bands of hill and field, as if bedded down for the season. After this series, Monet went on to paint poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and later his own garden at Giverny. Look once more at how the stack rises against the horizon here.