Artist: Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
Title: Les Meules à Giverny (The Stacks at Giverny)
Medium: Hand pulled copper plate etching, printed in Sepia ink, on cream laid paper after the original by Auguste Marie Lauzet (1865 – 1898).
Edition: Limited to only 50 examples.
Dimensions: Plate size 4 7/8 x 6 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 14 7/8 x 16 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
Haystacks is the common English title for a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The principal subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat (or possibly barley or oats: the original French title, Les Meules à Giverny, simply means The Stacks at Giverny). The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series (Wildenstein Index Numbers 1266-1290) which Monet began near the end of the summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring though Monet also produced earlier paintings using this same stack subject. The series is famous for the way in which Monet repeated the same subject to show the differing light and atmosphere at different times of day, across the seasons and in many types of weather. The series is among Monet’s most notable work.
Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.