Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
by Claude Monet (1890–1891)

With Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), Claude Monet transforms a humble subject into a profound meditation on time, light, and the rhythms of nature. Painted near his home in Giverny, this work is part of the celebrated Grainstack series, in which Monet revisited the same motif under varying conditions of season, time of day, and atmosphere.

What might seem at first glance like a simple agricultural scene—two haystacks resting in a sunlit field—becomes, through Monet’s brush, something far more elemental. The haystacks are not static objects, but vessels for color and light. The golden warmth of late summer floods the canvas, softening edges, stretching shadows, and wrapping the landscape in a quiet, fading glow.

This painting is not about the haystacks themselves, but about perception—how light shifts across hours, how color pulses with the seasons, how even stillness contains change. Monet painted this and dozens of related canvases from direct observation, often working on multiple versions at once to capture the fleeting transitions of weather and time.

Stacks of Wheat reflects Monet’s deepening commitment to series painting and his belief that reality could only be fully understood through repetition and variation. It is both deeply local—rooted in the fields of Normandy—and universally resonant, a lyrical reflection on impermanence and the poetry of everyday life.