Haystacks is the common English title for a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The principal subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat. The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series which Monet began near the end of the summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring, though Monet also produced five earlier paintings using this same stack subject. A precursor to the series is the 1884 Haystack Near Giverny.
Haystacks (Monet series)
Grainstacks, Snow Effect, 1890–91, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Grainstacks, White Frost Effect, 1889. Oil on canvas. Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT.
Grainstack at Giverny, 1888–89. Oil on canvas. Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Impression, Sunrise, an 1872 Claude Monet oil on canvas painting now housed at Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. This painting became the source of the movement's name after Louis Leroy's 1874 article, "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", satirically implied that the painting was, at most, a sketch.
J. M. W. Turner's atmospheric work was influential on the birth of Impressionism, here The Fighting Temeraire (1839)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876, Musée d'Orsay, one of Impressionism's most celebrated masterpieces.
Édouard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe), 1863