INTRODUCTION
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| Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) Claude Monet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
In this particular work, Monet compresses the dying warmth of late summer into a long, low panorama, where two monumental stacks rise like burnished cones against a band of distant trees and a wide, breathing sky. The subject could not be simpler; its orchestration of color, light, and touch could not be richer.
Below is a comprehensive exploration of this masterpiece—its artistic specialties, its making and materials, its provenance and exhibition history, a clear-eyed view of how the “Haystacks/Grainstacks” series has performed at auction, and a critical comparison with two closely related contemporaneous visions of harvest: Alfred Sisley’s haystacks at Moret and Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Stack under a Cloudy Sky.
The scene Monet painted—and the problem he set himself
Monet began the grainstacks near his home in the late months of 1890, continuing into 1891. He was not interested in picturesque agriculture so much as in devising a laboratory of perception. By choosing a stationary, nearly abstract form—the conical stacks—he could treat them as a neutral meter for changing light, atmosphere, and season.
In “Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)”, the stacks sit on a broad field cropped like a stage. The sun lies obliquely behind or to the side, slanting light along the stack ridges so that hot oranges and cooled violets flicker in counterpoint. The long horizontal format—a little over 60 × 100.5 cm—acts like a cinematic pan; our eye scans from the lower, shadowed foreground up across the golden mid-field to the distant tree line.
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| Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) Claude Monet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
The composition is calm, but the brushwork vibrates: passages of thick impasto braid together with breathed-on veils of diluted color, and final dry-brushed strokes skip across the surface, catching texture the way sun catches stubble.
Monet’s objective was not merely to “record” light but to stage its behavior. Late summer is the season of attenuated heat: the fields have been scythed, the stacks are full, evenings lengthen and cool. Monet expresses this with temperature contrasts—orange-red signatures against blue-violet shadows; straw-gold against a sky that softens from pearl to dove gray. He modulates value with extraordinary delicacy: the darker right flank of the principal stack keeps the palette from dissolving into sweetness; the horizon sits just a hair below center, so the sky feels spacious but not dominant. Nothing is accidental; everything is keyed to the sensation of “fin de l’été.”
Artistic specialties: technique, color, and the poetics of seriality
1) Surface orchestration and facture
What often surprises viewers who meet the painting in person is how varied the paint surface is. Monet sets thick, buttery strokes against whisper-thin scumbles; he drags a semi-dry brush over ridges to catch texture; he lays down broader, wetter sweeps in the sky to keep it breathing and unified.
Technical analysis of canvases from this series confirms that Monet was working on pre-primed linen with an off-white ground, often exploiting the ground’s luminosity in the thinnest passages so that the painting glows from within. In places, he adjusted the composition late—topping a stack, shifting a horizon—tiny changes that fine-tune the light geometry.
2) Color temperature and complementary harmonies
Monet’s late-summer chord here leans on the complementary tension of orange–blue and yellow–violet. The stacks’ sun-struck planes warm to apricot and ember, while shadows cool toward blue-lilac. This is not local color but experienced color—a system keyed to the felt temperature of light at day’s end.
3) Time as subject
The wheat stacks are vehicles for time. By painting them again and again, Monet made a serial form that behaves almost like music: each canvas is a movement with its own tempo (dawn, noonday brilliance, snow hush), and the motifs recur with variation. “End of Summer” is a transition movement—the fields are full, but the light already anticipates autumn. The series’ logic—same motif, different light—would later swell into his cathedrals, poplars, and ultimately the water-lilies. The seeds of twentieth-century serial abstraction are visible here.
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| Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) Claude Monet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
4) Format and scale
The elongated panorama (about 23⅝ × 39½ inches) does powerful work: it stretches the viewer’s scan, encourages side-to-side reading, and sets up a procession of accents—the lit stack, the secondary mound, the hedge, the sky band. It is a landscape that behaves like time-lapse.
Materials and making: what the canvas tells us
Scholarly conservation on the work documents a single off-white ground on plain-weave linen, with a warp-thread match to several other Monet canvases—evidence that he worked from the same bolt of fabric during this campaign. The paint handling shows juxtapositions of open brushwork and impasto, with certain final touches (for example, strokes indicating foliage or rim light) dragged lightly across dried layers to accent texture. The painting is signed and dated “Claude Monet 91” in orange-red paint at the lower left—a flare of chroma that doubles as a compositional spark.
Provenance and exhibition history
Few Impressionist masterpieces come with a provenance as classic—and as revealing of the early market for Monet—as this one.
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May 9, 1891: Monet sells the painting (then titled Meules, fin de l’été) to Durand-Ruel in Paris for 3,000 francs.
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June 26, 1891: Durand-Ruel sells it to Charles Fairchild of Boston for 5,000 francs, but on August 4 it is returned in exchange for another Monet (Sur la falaise à Pourville, 1882).
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August 4, 1891: Durand-Ruel sells it the same day to Potter Palmer of Chicago for 6,000 francs.
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By descent through the Palmer family to Arthur M. Wood Sr. (and Pauline Palmer Wood), who begins gifting fractional interests to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985; the museum completes ownership in 2007.
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The work has a rich exhibition history, including Monet’s 1891 show at Durand-Ruel, early twentieth-century loans in Boston and Chicago, and key late-twentieth-century retrospectives and thematic exhibitions.
This lineage—artist → Durand-Ruel → elite American collectors → major U.S. museum—is almost a synopsis of how Impressionism crossed the Atlantic, was cherished by Chicago patrons, and entered public collections.
Where the series sits in the market: auction history and benchmarks
Because “Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)” resides in a museum collection, it does not circulate on the auction market. But its series—Monet’s grainstacks—has set vital benchmarks:
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In May 2019, a luminous canvas from the series titled “Meules” sold for $110,747,000 in New York, establishing a new auction record for Monet and the first time an Impressionist painting surpassed $100 million at auction.
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Earlier, in November 2016, “Grainstack (Meule)” achieved $81.4 million, a then-record for the artist, after fierce bidding. These results confirm extraordinary demand for top-tier examples from the series.
Market significance matters art-historically because it reflects how the series has come to embody core values prized by collectors and museums alike: iconic motif, crystalline serial concept, radiant condition, and art-historical influence.
Critical comparison 1: Alfred Sisley’s haystacks—light as weather report
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| Haystacks at Moret - Morning light Alfred Sisley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Subject and stance. Sisley adopts the haystack motif, but his gaze is more topographic.
Where Monet simplifies the field into large bands and treats stacks as light collectors, Sisley maps a specific location in crisp morning sun. He inventories the sparkle—precise, quick dabs that suggest the dew lifting rather than the heat retreating.
Color and touch. Sisley’s palette runs cooler and cleaner: straw lights and sky blues stay distinct; shadows are airy rather than violet-saturated. His brushwork is a patchwork of small, even dashes that read as “notes” of color. Monet, by contrast, courts temperature drama—the orange against blue—and lets paint density carry emotion. Sisley’s haystacks are conversational; Monet’s are operatic.
Time of day vs. time of season. Sisley’s title foregrounds morning light (time of day); Monet’s insists on end of summer (time of season). This distinction is crucial. Sisley records a meteorological instant, Monet narrates a seasonal mood. Monet’s stacks are monuments to change; Sisley’s are brilliantly present.
Critical comparison 2: Vincent van Gogh’s wheat stacks—emotion under a restless sky
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| The Poplars at Saint-Rémy Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Form and pressure. Van Gogh pressurizes the motif: the stack is not a quiet reflector of light but an organism under weather. The sky churns with arabesques; the wheat shivers in directional strokes. You sense wind. Monet’s serial composure gives way to Van Gogh’s psychological weather.
Color and intent. Van Gogh pushes chroma into symbolic intensity—sulfurous yellows, greens that verge on acid, cobalts that slice.
Monet organizes complementary contrasts to describe light’s thermal logic; Van Gogh organizes them to charge feeling. One paints a system, the other a state of mind.
Space and scale. Monet’s horizon is a calm band; Van Gogh’s horizon buckles. Monet uses the panoramic format to lengthen time; Van Gogh uses the tilt of land and the torque of clouds to shorten it—the picture becomes an event.
Context in the series: snow, thaw, and the year as composition
To appreciate “End of Summer,” it helps to glance across its sister canvases. Monet kept stacks in the fields over winter specifically so he could observe snow effects and thaw: Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning is a crystalline counter-movement—blue shadows cast long, straw crusted with frost—demonstrating how the same conical form can host entirely different light physics. The series thus reads like a calendar in paint—harvest heat, frosty dawn, thaw’s murk, and back again to evening gold.
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| Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) Claude Monet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Why this canvas matters now
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Serial modernity. The logic of Monet’s series—fix the motif, vary the conditions—anticipates the procedures of later modernism, from Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire to the methodological repetitions of Minimal and Conceptual art.
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The rural sublime. Monet treats unheroic subject matter with the dignity of a sublime—but a measured, empirical sublime, sustained by observation rather than mythology.
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American collecting history. The path from Durand-Ruel to Chicago collectors and into a major Midwestern museum is the biography of Impressionism’s rise in the United States.
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Market validation. The record-setting results for sister canvases confirm not just scarcity but a widespread belief—among curators, scholars, and collectors—that the grainstacks represent Monet at his most conceptually rigorous and optically ravishing.
A close read of the picture: five minutes in front of the canvas
Stand three paces back. Let your eyes adjust. Notice how the principal stack on the right anchors the composition; the secondary stack answers it softly to the left, creating a call-and-response across the field. The shadow pool at the foot of the main stack is cool enough to taste; it throws the lit edge into relief and keeps the golds from going syrupy.
Track the horizon band of trees: it is not a flat green but a woven fabric of cools and warms, flicked with yellow-orange notes that rhyme with the signature. Lift your eyes to the sky: a long breath, broadly brushed, its subtle tonal steps guiding you out of the heat.
Now move in close. Watch the drag of a dry brush catching the canvas tooth; see how a single diagonal stroke can flick the edge of a straw bundle into light. The painting is calm at a distance and brisk up close—time made visible.
Monet, Sisley, Van Gogh: three harvests, three philosophies
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Monet: a scientist-poet of optical change, using seriality to plot light’s grammar.
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Sisley: a lyric meteorologist, mapping morning clarity and concrete place with even, musical brushwork.
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Van Gogh: an expressionist weather system, where the stack is not just seen but felt, shaped by currents of wind and psyche.
All three paint labor—cutting, binding, stacking—as the quiet heart of rural life. But their aims separate: Monet’s experiment, Sisley’s report, Van Gogh’s confession.
Key takeaways for readers, students, and collectors
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For students of art history: “End of Summer” is a primer in how format, color temperature, and brushwork create mood.
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For museumgoers: look for the oscillation between distance and nearness—the painting rewards both.
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For collectors and market watchers: even though this specific canvas is not on the block, the series’ auction performance underscores an enduring consensus about its centrality to Monet’s achievement.
Conclusion
“Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)” is a masterclass in how to make time visible. With two cones of straw and a strip of sky, Monet composes a drama where sun and shade swap partners, color breathes, and the year itself seems to turn in front of us. Its material facts—the weave of linen, the off-white ground, the dry-brushed flickers—are not trivia but evidence of thinking: they show a painter engineering sensations.
Its provenance narrates how Impressionism crossed borders and tastes, moving from avant-garde purchase to American patronage to public trust. And when set against Sisley’s precise morning and Van Gogh’s storm-charged stack, Monet’s late-summer vision stands out as the serene, measured heartbeat of a revolution in seeing.
References (web sources)
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Detailed tombstone, technique, provenance, and exhibition history for “Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)”.
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On the grainstacks kept over winter and the seasonal breadth of the series.
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Overview of the Haystacks/Grainstacks campaign.
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Auction benchmarks for the series: $110.7M record for Meules (2019); prior $81.4M result for Grainstack (Meule) (2016).
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Alfred Sisley comparison: Haystacks at Moret, Morning Light (1891).
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Vincent van Gogh comparison: Wheat Stack under a Cloudy Sky (1889)
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