A farmer’s-eye view of Monet’s hay
Picture Claude Monet in a farmer’s field, not far from his home in Giverny, early in the morning, a conductor waving his oiled baton before an orchestra of canvases perched on easels.
He strolls from one to the next as the sun curls the shadows on the watching grainstack, his subject and his audience. Instructing each canvas in turn and learning as he goes, Monet has an assembly line in operation, complete with gear-laden assistants scurrying in and out of the scene.
The canvases participating in Monet’s symphony of the winter of 1890-91 found immediate fame thereafter. Durand-Ruel showed them in Paris in May ‘91, probably just after the hillocks of hay themselves had been chopped up by the threshers, and sold most of them within days, each for as much as 1,000 francs.
The one shown here, “Grainstacks (Snow Effects — Sunlight)”, found immortality, or something like it, at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.
For Camille Pissarro, Monet’s haystacks “breathed contentment”. “What lies beyond progress itself” is how the art critic Octave Mirbeau described the paintings.
They did not, however, halt progress, as some actually hoped. They could not save the old ways of the countryside from the inevitable industrial onslaught. The contentment would soon disappear into the noisy maw of combine harvesters.
Wikipedia has a nice entry about the haystacks, and never to be forgotten when the subject comes up is Alan Ritch’s dream-inducing website Hay in Art. The hi-res images of the haystacks come from the wonderfully wonky Art 4 2Day.
