Stacks of Wheat, End of Day, Autumn

Monet began his sustained campaign painting the wheat stacks on his neighbour's fields in the autumn of 1890, returning to the same motif across seasons and times of day. He reportedly told a student that he needed a second canvas whenever the light changed, a remark that crystallised his belief that the true subject of a painting was never the object but the conditions of its illumination. This work, capturing the final warm light of an autumn afternoon, was part of the group of approximately twenty-five canvases shown at Durand-Ruel's Paris gallery in May 1891. The exhibition sold out within days and established Monet as the exemplary painter of Impressionism's mature, serial phase. The critic Gustave Geffroy wrote that the series demonstrated how a single subject could yield an inexhaustible range of pictorial sensation. Several of these canvases passed into American collections almost immediately; today they are distributed among the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and other major institutions. The Grainstacks are now recognised as a turning point in Western painting, anticipating the serial investigations of modernism by showing that subject matter was subordinate to perception.