Haystacks, end of Summer

Haystacks, End of Summer from 1891 at the Musée d'Orsay is the sole Haystacks variant in the French national collection and one of the most formally perfect of the entire series. The haystack campaign began informally in 1889 when Monet started making studies of the grain stacks in a field near his Giverny house, but by 1890 he had conceived the project as a systematic serial investigation and was working on multiple canvases simultaneously. The 'end of summer' timing — when the stacks had reached their maximum size before being dismantled for threshing — was one Monet returned to repeatedly because the warm, haze-filtered light and long late-afternoon shadows created what he regarded as the season's most visually rich conditions. Pissarro, who visited Giverny during the campaign and saw canvases in progress, wrote to his son that the series was 'an extraordinary effort, without precedent' — a generous response from an artist whose own serial practice had influenced Monet's development. The fifteen Haystacks canvases shown at Durand-Ruel in 1891 sold out before the exhibition closed.

The haystack's warm ochre-orange is complemented by cool blue-green shadows on the ground and a warm haze-filtered sky. Long shadows indicate late afternoon light. Monet's surface treatment is richly impasted in the lit zones, the complementary colors of stack and shadow creating strong optical vibration at reading distance.