Artwork
Haystack at Giverny
Haystack at Giverny is an oil painting by the Impressionist artist Claude Monet. It dates from 1894 and is held in the collection of the Hermitage Museum.
About this work
Subject & Meaning
The painting depicts a haystack in the foreground of a sunlit summer field at Giverny, with farm buildings visible in the distance against hedgerows of trees.
The painting depicts a haystack in the foreground of a sunlit summer field at Giverny, with farm buildings visible in the distance against hedgerows of trees. The sky at the horizon turns cloudy, suggesting a shifting, windy atmosphere. Though the haystack might evoke Monet's later celebrated *Haystacks* series, here the motif is more incidental, a landscape element rather than the concentrated serial subject of those later grainstacks. The work revisits nearly the same view as Monet's 1885 *Poppy Field at Giverny*, with the haystack added as a new focal point. As an Impressionist landscape, the painting's meaning lies in its attentive recording of transient light and weather conditions in the French countryside.
Technique & Style
Executed in oil on canvas in 1886, the work measures 60.5 × 81.5 cm. Monet applied oil paint in loose, rapid brushwork characteristic of Impressionist handling, building up broken color to convey the shifting effects of light and atmosphere across the haystack, adjacent field, and sky.
The composition situates a haystack in the foreground with farm buildings and hedges receding into the middle ground, while the horizon shows a changing, increasingly cloudy sky. This arrangement revisits a view Monet had treated the previous year in Field of Poppies at Giverny, substituting the haystack for the earlier field of flowers.
History & Provenance
Haystack at Giverny was painted in 1886 by Claude Monet as an oil on canvas measuring 60.5 × 81.5 cm. The work belongs to Monet’s series of haystack subjects and re‑uses the viewpoint of his 1885 painting Champ de Coquelicots à Giverny, adding a haystack in the foreground. According to the sources, the painting is now housed in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg; no earlier owners or acquisition date are recorded in the available material, and there is no indication that the picture was commissioned.
The painting is held in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
It is inventoried as accession number ГЭ-7603.
It has been exhibited at the Hermitage since at least the mid-20th century, and its presence in the museum’s holdings is documented in French and Italian Wikipedia entries.
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Artist & collection
Artist
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it.
