Article: Haystacks in French Painting, Before and After Monet

Share

Home›How to collect antique paintings›Haystacks in French Painting, Before ...

Haystacks in French Painting, Before and After Monet

When Monet began his Meules at Giverny in 1890, French painters had been painting haystacks for sixty years.

He did not invent the subject. He made it the whole picture.

Sheaves of bound grain standing in a stubble field, a tree leaning in at the right, signed Cals

In rows Bound sheaves receding in a line toward two poplars. Haystacks in a Stubble Field, Adolphe-Félix Cals

Weathered thatched ricks beside a track, with loose gold hay at the right, signed and dated 1882

Thatched Weathered ricks beside a heap of new gold hay, dated 1882. Haystacks Landscape, Eugène Forest, 1882

Haystack is one English word for two French objects, the gerbe, a sheaf left to dry on the stubble, and the meule, a stack built to hold the crop.

What a Haystack Painting Actually Shows

Two French words for what English calls one thing.

Gaston Bonfils, Haystacks in a Harvest Field · Gaston Guignard, Shepherd and Flock among Haystacks

Bonfils, detail. Sheaves drying where they were cut.La gerbeThe sheafCereal cut, bound and stood in small hollow cones on the stubble to drySmall and many, set out across the fieldAugust, high sun, short shadows

Guignard, detail. The shepherd gives the scale.La meuleThe stackThe dried sheaves carried to the farm and built into stacks, sometimes as high as a house, until threshingLarge and fewLow autumn light, frequent mist

Monet titled his series Meules. English collapsed both objects into one word, and museums have been correcting the title ever since.

How to Date a Haystack Painting

The same field, painted in two languages.

	Barbizon · 1840-1870	Impressionist · 1870-1900
The stack	Solid and weighty, visible texture	A field of broken color, the form dissolving into light
The figures	Almost always there, at work	Increasingly absent, the stacks stand alone
The sky	Half the picture or more, carrying the weather	Cut to a band at the top, the stacks pushed forward
The foreground	Thin horizontal sweeps, the panel showing through	Heavy impasto, palette-knife ridges

Most period canvases sit somewhere along these lines, not at either end. A painter working in 1880 had both languages and chose, field by field.

The Great Haystack Painters

Sixty years of stacks, from Millet to Monet.

1850sMilletThe stack is tied to the work and to the people who built it.

LhermitteHarvest scenes between the Barbizon Realists and the Impressionists.

1877Bastien-LepageLes Foins. Exhausted haymakers, stacks under a hazy sky.

1890sPissarroAt Éragny, the weight of one column and the broken color of the other.

1890-91MonetThe same stacks under every light, shown together at Durand-Ruel in May 1891.

The figures leave and the light stays. Monet's series is the end of that shift, not its beginning.

Buying a Haystack Painting

Look at the shadow before anything else.

Painted from lifeThe shadow agreeswith the light on the lit side and with the hour the picture claims.

From memoryIt rarely doesA stack copied from another painting, or remembered, loses the hour.

The Bonfils and the Guignard above are both signed in the lower left corner.

Works citedJules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, 1877. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Claude Monet, Stacks of Wheat, End of Day, Autumn, 1890-91. Art Institute of Chicago
Claude Monet, Meules, fin de l'été, 1891. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Claude Monet, Grainstack, Sunset, 1891. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Camille Pissarro, Haystacks, Morning, Éragny. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sheaves and stacks for sale

Signed Adolphe-Félix Cals landscape of sheaves in a stubble field, oil on canvas, 19th century French school, in a gilt frame with flower corners

Adolphe Félix CalsHaystacks in a Stubble Field $8,900See the painting

Antique French Barbizon landscape with haystacks signed and dated 1882, oil on wood panel in a gilded carved frame

Eugène ForestHaystacks Landscape, 1880s $2,600See the painting

Antique French landscape with four large haystacks and a shepherd driving his flock, oil on canvas in a gilded frame

Alexandre Gaston GuignardShepherd among Haystacks $3,600See the painting

Five stooks of cut wheat in a stubble field under a clouded summer sky, a dark treeline behind, in a carved gilt and black frame (Gaston Bonfils)

Gaston BonfilsSheaves in a Harvest Field $2,400See the painting

For sale

Antique Landscape Paintings18 paintingsBrowse the collection

Keep reading More in The Landscape TraditionFrench Impressionist Landscape Painting Beyond the Famous Names Related guideThe Barbizon School in Painting Related guidePastoral Scenes, Shepherds and Sheep in 19th-Century French Painting Every guide, by subject

Original works, shipped free to the US and Canada, packed and tracked|Over 1,100 paintings sold since 2017

Photographs and descriptions of the paintings in our collection by GalerieClub Fine Art.