Why Claude Monet's Meules à Giverny is an Impressionist Masterpiece
In 1893, at the height of the hay-making season, Claude Monet set up his easel in the meadow just to the south of the site of his future water-lily pond and painted Meules à Giverny. Infused with light, shadow, color and movement, this oil exemplifies the best of Monet’s bucolic Impressionism, taking as its subject one of the artist’s most beloved—that of the haystack.
“This Cathedral is admirable, but it is terribly dry and hard to do; it will be a delight for me after this to paint en plein air.”
Unlike any paintings on this subject he had executed before, the present work and two directly related compositions (W. 1363 and W. 1364) make full use of the revelations in surface handling that Monet discovered in his series focused on Rouen Cathedral, which he began in 1892 and finished in 1894 (see fig. 1). During the associated painting campaigns in Rouen the artist, rather unsurprisingly, reflected in his letters to his wife that he was not a city person: “... it is decidedly not my business to be in cities.” According to Paul Hayes Tucker, “he also spoke of how he missed Giverny and how he wanted to paint in the spring. He made these same stat.mes nts during his second campaign in Rouen. ‘This Cathedral is admirable,’ he admitted to Alice in March of 1893, ‘but it is terribly dry and hard to do; it will be a delight for me after this to paint en plein air.’ ‘Giverny must be so beautiful that I dare not even think about it’” (Exh. Cat., Boston, Museum of Replica Handbags s, Monet in the ‘90s, The Series Paintings, 1989-90, p. 165). It was with this desire that Monet set out to paint Meules à Giverny and it is this deep sense of fulfilled longing and homecoming that suffuses every brushstroke of the present work.
Monet found his inspiration in the fields adjacent to his home in Giverny; taking the principal imagery of the monolithic grainstacks which dominate the harvested fields from the high spring onward. Commonly known as his Haystacks, these canvases are anchored by gigantic conical structures, composed of wheat or grain, stacked in such a way as to allow the stalks to dry and prevent mold prior to the grain’s separation from the stalk by a threshing machine. Each village did not possess its own thresher, and the wait for one of these traveling machines to reach a specific location often took months—grain cut in the summer might sit in its neat and careful stack until January or February of the following year. These stacks were over ten feet in height, somet.mes s reaching over twenty feet, their shape varying by region.
"A landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; it lives by virtue of its surroundings—the air and light—which vary continually"
The subject of the haystack (or grainstack in some cases) had appeared in Monet’s canvases as early as the mid-1880s (see carousel below). In 1884, haystacks (composed of hay) sit in front of a row of poplars (W. 900-902); while in 1885, the stacks are leaned against by young figures dressed for a summer day (W. 993-95), and, in 1886, they form a small part of a broader and more expansive view of the surrounding countryside (W.1073 and 1074). It was not until two years later in 1888 that Monet began to place these grainstacks as the central motif of a composition (W. 1213-17) and then in 1890-91 Monet completed was is commonly viewed as his first series, some twenty-five canvases in which the Meules are depicted in a variety of light and weather effects (W. 1266-90). Meules à Giverny, along with two other works (W. 1363 and W. 1364), was completed in the midst of his Cathedral paintings in 1893. This was the last moment Monet fully engaged with the subject of the large haystacks (three oils completed the following year depict the very different shape of meulettes, a preparatory stage in the storing process (W. 1383-85)).
A Decade of Inquiry: Claude Monet’s Meules, 1884 to 1894
In choosing these powerful grainstacks as his subject, Monet continued a long tradition of depicting the French countryside and its abundant riches as seen in the paintings of such artists as Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon school (see fig. 2). Monet’s fellow Impressionists, most notably Camille Pissarro, had also included imagery of haystacks in their work. As early as 1873, Pissarro places a haystack front and center, its roughly triangular form breaking the horizon line and dominating the field and figures that surround it (see fig. 3). Almost twenty years later his haystacks appear smaller in size, tucked between trees and pathways near his home in Éragny. However, Monet updated and adapted this tradition to striking effect: his grainstacks series contain virtually no anecdotal detail; no dogs or laborers, no figures walking through the fields or birds flying in the sky. The artist pares down his vision to focus solely on the grainstacks themselves, on the play of light or night on them, on the sky and the horizon. In this reduction of motif, Monet echoes the purity of line and form evident in Japanese colored woodblock prints by such masters as Hokusai (see fig. 4) that began to be seen in the West in the mid-nineteenth century, and also demonstrates a divergence of approach from contemporary artists such as Vincent van Gogh, who treated the same subject in Arles during 1890 with very different aims, imbuing his subject with a wealth of details that Monet chose to exclude from his painting (see fig. 5).
TOP RIGHT: FIG. 4 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, SOUTH WIND AND CLEARING WEATHER THIRTY-SIX VIEWS OF MT. FUJI, CIRCA 1831, YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, NEW HAVEN
BOTTOM RIGHT: FIG. 5 VINCENT VAN GOGH, STACKS OF WHEAT BY A FARM, JUNE 1888, RIJKSMUSEUM KRÖLLER-MÜLLER, OTTERLO
While van Gogh's stacks, situated by a farmhouse, portray a scene of continuing work and human interaction, Paul Gauguin portrays them mid-construction, where local women manipulate the interior of the stack while thronged by chickens (see fig. 6). This context underscores the separation from Pissarro and Millet’s imagery, showing the stacks primarily as temporary architectural constructions in the landscape. A step even further removed can be found in Degas’ Quatre danseuses, where ballerina’s primp and spin in front of an ideal pastoral backdrop featuring several towering grainstacks (see fig. 7).
Right: Fig. 7 Edgar Degas, Quatre danseuses, circa 1899, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The theme of the harvest, as an essential cyclical human activity which indicated success or failure, feast or famine and ensured the passage of t.mes , has a storied presence in artistic imagery since ancient t.mes s. From a wall painting from the Ramesside period of ancient Egypt circa 13th-11th centuries B.C. to an idealized image of medieval peasant life for the month of June in the Très riches heures of the Duke de Berry, executed by the Limbourg brothers in the early 1400s to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters, the growth and collects ion of grain is depicted as integral to human life and development and can be conflated with the rise of human civilization (see figs. 8-10).
Bottom left: Fig. 9 Limbourg Brothers, Les Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, Juin, circa 1412-16, Musée Condé, Chantilly
Bottom Right: Fig. 10 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Though the new modern behemoth, the railroad, wended its way across France by 1893, the importance of the harvest for the countryside, town and state was still paramount. In the careful preparation, harvest and storage methods exhibited by each grainstack, the economic health of the countryside was demonstrated. A good harvest and correct farming methods ensured the prosperity of the farmer and town, and by extension the city and state. The notion of the stacks carrying the wealth of their owners finds a resonance in Monet’s depiction of their surfaces and the volumetric play of their shapes. The primary stack in the present composition and those that populate the more distant background are broad, full structures that suggest the great fertility and bountifulness of the Normandy landscape. Their surfaces are gilded and burnished with the light of the sun, and the whole scene is infused with a sense of well-being, vitality and the harmony of nature.
Meules à Giverny has a storied provenance. Just two years after it was painted, the present work was acquired by the artist Dwight Blaney on a trip to Paris. Bringing Meules à Giverny back to the United States, Blaney lent the painting almost immediately to the Museum of Replica Handbags
s, Boston. He continued to lend the painting, including to the 1905 Monet exhibition at the Copley Society in Boston where it hung alongside dozens of other works by the artist and adjacent to works by Rodin (see fig. 11). Blaney’s summer home on Ironbound Island in Maine’s Frenchman’s Bay was a magnet for artists of the t.mes
including his close friend John Singer Sargent, who painted Blaney on a number of occasions (see fig. 12). Coincidentally, Sargent was the first owner of Claude Monet’s Bennecourt, also coming to auction from the same collects
ion as the present work (see lot 13). Blaney kept Meules à Giverny throughout his life. Shortly after his death in 1944, John Hay Whitney acquired this painting for his tremendous collects
ion. For the past twenty years Meules à Giverny has been held in a private collects
ion and has rarely been shown publicly.