1890
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Dominant colour
Stack of Wheat is a 1890 oil by Claude Monet, a Impressionism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
Monet painted tall, golden wheat stacks in a field near his home. He set up several easels at once, working fast to catch changing light. Each canvas shows the same scene, but colors shift with the weather. This series made Monet’s name. Before this, people saw him as a sketchy landscape guy. Now, critics called these paintings bold and new. He sold every stack painting in one day in 1891. Try Monet’s Water Lilies next at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The monumental stacks that Claude Monet depicted in his series Stacks of Wheat rose fifteen to twenty feet and stood just outside the artist’s farmhouse at Giverny. Through 1890 and 1891, he worked on this series both in the field, painting simultaneously at several easels, and in the studio, refining pictorial harmonies. In May 1891, Monet hung fifteen of these canvases next to each other in one small room in the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. An unprecedented critical and financial success, the exhibition marked a breakthrough in Monet’s career, as well as in the history of French art. In…
The artist (d. 1926); possibly sold to Isidore Montaignac, Paris, May 1899 [per Wildenstein 1996; the painting may have been sold as Meule, temps gris. According to Brettell 1984, the painting was acquired by Bertha Honoré Palmer, Chicago, by 1892]. Bertha Honoré Palmer (d. 1918), Chicago [per Brettell 1984]; by descent to the Palmer family; by descent to Pauline Wood (née Palmer), by Oct. 1951 [per shipping out order A647, on file in Museum Registration]. Acquavella Galleries, New York, probably 1982 [per Tiffany Johnston, Art Institute of Chicago, telephone conversation with Jean Edmonson,…
Possibly Paris, Galeries Durand-Ruel, Exposition d’oeuvres récentes de Claude Monet, May 1891, cat. 11, as Meule. (Hiver.). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, June 28–Sept. 16, 1984, cat. 106 (ill.); Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 23, 1984–Jan. 6, 1985; Paris, Galeries Nationales, Grand Palais, as L’impressionnisme et le paysage français, Feb. 4–Apr. 22, 1985. Tokyo, Seibu Museum of Art, Shikago bijutsukan inshō-ha ten [The Impressionist tradition: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago], Oct. 18–Dec. 17, 1985, cat. 57…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, and raised from the age of five in Le Havre, where he began selling charcoal caricatures as a teenager.
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