Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn)

The conical stacks piled in the stubble fields around Giverny offered Claude Monet a motif of almost limitless variation. Through the winter of 1890–91 he devoted to them the canvases that became the first great demonstration of serial Impressionism, and when some twenty were shown together in Paris in 1891 the exhibition was received almost as a manifesto, the grain stack entering modern art as a subject in its own right. The Art Institute of Chicago keeps one of the fullest concentrations of the series, several seasons and times of day represented, with this view of the stacks at the close of an autumn day among the group. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.