Monet’s paintings from this series bear the French title Meules, a word that can be translated as “stacks.” For a long time the title was misinterpreted as Haystacks; however, the objects in Monet’s paintings are actually sheaves of grain. In the agriculture of nineteenth-century Normandy, conical stacks of unthreshed grain were covered with straw or hay to protect the valuable harvest from moisture and rot. Monet, who had a fine sensibility for the structure of the landscape, must have been fascinated by these quasi-sculptural objects of considerable size that appeared at the same time every year in the fields surrounding his house, covering the meadows in a kind of temporary installation. The motif also had symbolic character for the predominantly agricultural community of Giverny, and at the same time allowed Monet, by means of his serial approach, to explore the cyclical transformation of nature in the changing of the seasons—and with it the very passage of time.
This work has a special place among the twenty-five versions of grainstacks that Monet painted within the space of only a few months in 1890 and 1891. The strong visual diagonal introduces a dynamic element into the composition, which the artist strengthened by means of unusually intense colors and a backlit effect. More than any other version of the motif, the composition shows the influence of the colored Japanese woodcuts that Monet, like many of his fellow artists, so enthusiastically collected.
In the late nineteenth century this picture, along with eight other variations of the Grainstacks, was in the possession of the Chicago collector and patroness Bertha Palmer. In the four-volume catalogue raisonné of Monet’s paintings produced by Daniel Wildenstein, it is listed as no. 1273 (vol. 3, p. 490).
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