National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Long revered as Monet’s most exquisite series, the Haystack paintings are remarkable for the range of light and weather conditions portrayed. In Haystacks, midday the edges of the stacks shimmer in the heat, and sunlight appears to radiate from the structures themselves. Elsewhere, in the snow scenes, the forms seem to absorb light. The practical nature of the stacks – a means of storing the harvest – receives less attention. When the sheaves of wheat or oats were cut, the cereal stacks were thatched with straw and left to stand until spring, and the arrival of the threshing machines that moved between villages. For a country still smarting from the effects of the Franco–Prussian war – and in a period when France seemed to be rapidly overtaken by industrialised Britain, Germany, the United States or even Russia – Monet’s choice of motif, like the series of poplar paintings that followed, was reassuringly French. The haystacks resonate with notions of rural productivity and the relative harmony of country life