Monet’s Grainstacks II

“Monet’s paintings from this series bear the French title Meules, a word that can be translated as “stacks.” For a long time the title was misinterpreted as Haystacks; however, the objects in Monet’s paintings are actually sheaves of grain. In the agriculture of nineteenth-century Normandy, conical stacks of unthreshed grain were covered with straw or hay to protect the valuable harvest from moisture and rot. Monet, who had a fine sensibility for the structure of the landscape, must have been fascinated by these quasi-sculptural objects of considerable size that appeared at the same time every year in the fields surrounding his house, covering the meadows in a kind of temporary installation. The motif also had symbolic character for the predominantly agricultural community of Giverny…