Claude Monet painted stacks of wheat thirty times in thirty different conditions. He explains why:
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 vary continually.
The J. Paul Getty Museum has one of Monet’s stacks of wheat paintings, titled Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning. It is illustrated and described on page 140 of The Getty’s Handbook of the Collections, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, 1997; Monet’s remark, above, is part of the description.
The Art Institute of Chicago holds six of Monet’s paintings of stacks of wheat. When we were last there, they were in a row, illustrating the truth of his remark.
It is the same for real landscape. Destroy a landscape and it isn’t one thing that gets destroyed. It is as many special things as would appear in the course of the seasons and the years - millions, each a special mood, all killed forever by one act.
For a brief biography of Claude Monet, click here. For images of his stacks of wheat, click here.
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