In the fall of 1890 Monet, the acknowledged master ofImpressionist landscape, began his first series. His motif was the wheatstacks located in a field just outside his garden at Giverny. Using brightly colored, rhythmically applied pigments, Monet produced thirty canvases that captured what he called his "experience" of the wheatstacks as they were transformed by nature's permutations. He said, "For me a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; but it lives by virtue of its surroundings—the air and the light—which varycontinually."

In May 1891 Monet's exhibition of fifteen of the wheatstack paintings at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, caused a sensation. It seemed to Monet's friend the critic Gustave Geffroy as i f the artist had unmasked the "changing faces o f nature" and captured its very mood. To Geffroy the winter wheatstacks, frozen in snow, evoked "the white silence of space." But it was a stillness broken by the impact of the artist's hand as it recorded, "snow... litwith a rosy light shot through with pure blue shadows" and "nature's mysterious enchantment [murmuring] incantations of form and color."

Monet completed Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning in February 1891 and sold it four months before the famous exhibition. It is one of the most tightly structured paintingsintheseries.Theroundedformsofthestacksareplayedoffagainstthe firm, horizontal geometries of the receding field, hills, and sky. Form and color take on the same visual substance as the solid red stacks are brought into compositional balance by the intense blue of their cast shadows. Varied brushstrokes evoke different light effects, such as the delicate pastel nuances in the muted winter sky, or the bright flecked reflections on the stacks. The painting's densely worked, complex surface records Monet's long, intense efforts in the studio as he strove to capture a particular moment that he said would never return. 

At lower left, signed and dated Claude Monet '91 

Object Number: 95.PA.63 

Provenance:

1891 Boussod, Valadon & Cie. (Paris, France) purchased from the artist, 1891; sold to Lonquety, 1891. Source: Getty Research Institute, Goupil & Cie./Boussod, Valadon & Cie. Stock Books, Book 12, no. 21179, p. 188, row 9.

1891 - 1918 Maurice LonquetyFrench, 1859 - 1918 (Paris, France) by inheritance to his wife, Mme Maurice Lonquety, 1918.

1918-still in 1936 Mme Maurice LonquetyFrench 1968 Pierre Marbeau (Paris, France) - 1969 Acquavella Galleries, Inc. (New York, New York) sold to John Thomson Dorrance, Jr., 1969.

1969 - 1989 John Thompson Dorrance, Jr.American, 1919 - 1989 (Pennsylvania) [sold, Dorrance sale, Sotheby's, New York, October 18, 1989, lot 32, to Henryk de Kwiatkowski.]

1989 - 1995 Henryk de Kwiatkowski (New York, New York) sold through Apollo Art Advisory Services (London, England) to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995.