Claude Monet | Meules, 1890

The year 1890 was a watershed moment in Claude Monet’s life-he turned fifty, bought property for the first time and negotiated the purchase of Édouard Manet’s Olympia and its ensuing placement in the French national collection.

Any of these could have been the most notable occurrence of that period, but 1890 was also the year that Monet painted the most definitive artistic series of the nineteenth century - his Meules.

Claude Monet | Meules, 1890 | Sotheby's

This acclaimed series found its inspiration in the fields adjacent to his home in Giverny; the series takes as its principal imagery the monolithic grainstacks which dominated the harvested fields from the high summer onward.

Meules, 1890 - is the most evocative and glorious example from the most famed group of pictures in the nineteenth-century western canon.

Commonly known as his Haystacks, these canvases were dominated by gigantic conical structures, composed of wheat or grain, stacked in such a way as to allow the stalks to dry and prevent mold prior to the grain’s separation from the stalk by a threshing machine.

Each village did not possess its own thresher, and the wait for one of these traveling machines to reach a specific location often took months-grain cut in the summer might sit in its neat and careful stack until January or February of the following year.

Claude Monet | Meule, 1891 | Christie's

These stacks were over ten feet in height, sometimes reaching over twenty feet, their shape varying by region.

The blond monoliths in Monet’s canvases possess the typical shape of the grain stacks in the Normandy countryside, a cylindrical base topped with a peaked dome, which lay all around him in the fields of Giverny. | Source: © Sotheby's

Claude Monet | Haystacks, 1885 | Ohara Museum of Art