Dali House

I thought for sure I’d found another excellent candidate for a “Weird Internet Sites” post when I stumbled across Hay in Art – “a collection of great works of hay” – while stalking Turner, but this three-year-old cyber-gallery by Alan Ritch of Santa Cruz, California, quite simply overwhelms any intent to ridicule with an astonishing range of lovely paintings and drawings (”currently 5,015 items in the database”) and a good dose of humour. Witness the entry on Bosch, subtitled Wain’s World.
The smirkability factor looms large throughout but, as one visitor commented, “I had no idea hay nerdiness could go so far as to look authentically interesting”. Ritch’s nerdiness is scholarly, though. He abbreviates comments like “the texture of the windrow on which the girl is lying is very well depicted” with poetry by everyone from William Carlos Williams to Oscar Wilde (”a barge with ochre-coloured hay”) and pointed admonishments for you city folk who wander into the bucolic countryside with the idea of painting any old gathered crop mound you see and calling it a “haystack”:
“Because very few artists and art historians were also farmers, many of the so-called ‘haystacks’ in Western art actually depict stacks of wheat or other grain crops … Hay was cut from green grass with a scythe, laid in parallel windrows on the ground, dried and turned with hand-held or horse-drawn rakes after a few days of sunshine, raked by hand or horse-drawn sleds into ‘cobs’ or ‘cocks’ or head-high stacks in the field for further drying, then carted to the farmyard or barn where they were made into more durable ricks or stacks out of the weather’s way. Grain crops were cut with scythe or sickle when the plants had already turned from green to gold; the fallen plants were immediately bundled into a sheaf, tied with a few straw stalks; then six to eight sheaves were leaned against each other to form a reasonably weather-proof stook or shook, which stood in the field until the sheaves were carted off to compose larger even more rain-resistant stacks, grain-ends in, cut-stalks out, either in a barn or left out in the fields.”
The guy clearly knows his stacks of whatever they are. It reminds me of Anthony Burgess’ slim history on artful sleeping, “On Going to Bed” (aka “And So to Bed”), a fun (if pedantic) celebration of snoozing.
So what the hell was Monet painting? Meules, apparently:
“The French meule can refer to either stack, but even a cursory examination of Monet’s famous meules (often casually translated as ‘haystacks’) reveals the essential differences between meules de foin and meules de grain. The latter cereal stacks, made of sheaves often used to be thatched as protection against the autumn rains and continued to stand in the fields through the winter months until the threshing (separation of grain from straw) was done, usually by the early spring. Many of Monet’s meules are highlighted with snow, and all of these and the other tidy cones in varying lights and seasons are grainstacks. His haystacks are relatively few, always done in the dappled light of summer, and to be even more precise, they are haycocks, small, shaggy, temporary heaps of hay, soon to be carted off to the farmsteads of Giverny.”
Didn’t know that, did you? For the record, that’s a grainstack by Monet pictured above, not a haystack.
Elsewhere on the site, old Heironymus Bosch is centre stage for a discussion of hay symbolism in art. “The wonderfully varied symbolic and metaphoric associations of hay mirror its cultural and economic importance in the history of humanity. Hay has variously symbolised wealth and poverty, sexuality, love, life and death. The somewhat dated saying in our own culture ‘that ain’t hay’ (meaning ‘that’s not entirely worthless’) is remotely connected to the beliefs and rituals of the Low Countries of Europe over half a millenium ago.
But as I said, it’s not the notion and not the nerdly musings that make Hay in Art worth a visit. It’s the way all of that is illustrated.
The painting at the top of this post is by Edward William Cooke, from 1835, and the commentary Ritchie has borrowed runs thus: “Thames barges such as this carried hay and other goods to London and around the southeast English coast. These barges brought hay from as far as Suffolk and Margate on the Kentish shore to feed the thousands of horses in London, returning with loads of manure to spread on the fields.”
Lovely.
And finally, Bruegel out in one of his busy, busy fields, doing a little “Haymaking” in 1565.