Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

Claude Monet · 1890–91

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

60 × 100.5 cm (23 5/8 × 39 9/16 in.); Framed: 75.6 × 116.6 × 7.4 cm (29 3/4 × 45 7/8 × 2 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) is one of the most quietly powerful works in Claude Monet's celebrated Haystacks series — a meditation on light, season, and the passage of time rendered in warm, luminous brushwork. Monet painted the series between 1890 and 1891, returning to the same wheat stacks near his home in Giverny at different hours and across changing seasons. Rather than documenting the stacks themselves, he used them as fixed anchors to study how atmosphere and light transform the same subject entirely. The result was a revelation in Western painting — for the first time, time itself became the true subject of a body of work. When fifteen paintings from the series were exhibited together at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris in 1891, they sold out within days, cementing Monet's reputation and influencing a generation of artists including Wassily Kandinsky, who later wrote that seeing one of the haystacks had permanently changed his understanding of what painting could be. This hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas faithfully recreates the layered, broken brushstrokes and the golden warmth of the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago — a piece made to live with, not merely to look at.