Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

Claude Monet is popularly known as the master of Impressionism. He gained a local reputation as a caricaturist when he was a teenager, but with Eugène Boudin’s guidance he learnt plein air painting and got introduced to artists like Auguste Renoir, Frédréric Bazille etc, who form the first core of Impressionists. FitzGerald (1905) quotes Claude Monet as the “Master of Impressionism”. While the impression was a collective effort and artistic experimentation along with a rebellion against the traditional and rigid French Academic Salon, Monet still stands to be the driving force after the memento. FitzGerald believes that Monet’s painting and artistic approach fundamentally changed modern art and how human perception translates colour, light, etc. It was the instantaneity that Monet needed to capture that made each painting stand out and alive. Monet didn’t just paint a scene but every breath and movement of every element in it, making it real and life-like despite its abstract natured paintings. Monet’s experimentation with colour and techniques revolutionized Modern Art. In 1890-91, Monet depicted these stacks of wheat or ‘Haystacks’, which were about 15 to 20 feet in real life right outside his house in Giverny. This is a part of a series out of which in 1890, 15 paintings were hung next to each other in Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. The exhibition acted as a breakthrough not just for Monet but also in French art. In the painting, the autumn starts as the stacks of wheat break the setting sun and horizon. In the winter view of the series, all the stacks are laid and bedded down for the season. In this way, the stack acts as a metaphor for survival and sustenance and resilience, much like Monet did before his breakthrough.