Why Did Monet Paint the Same Thing Over and Over?

A pile of hay. A church façade. A patch of pond. On paper, these are the least exciting subjects imaginable, and Claude Monet painted each of them dozens of times. It looks like repetition, even obsession. But Monet wasn't stuck. He had realized something that reorganized the last decades of his life: the haystack was never the point.

What are Monet's "series" paintings?

Monet's "series" are groups of paintings in which he depicted a single motif over and over under changing conditions of light and weather. Beginning in earnest in the 1890s, he produced whole suites: the Haystacks (or Stacks of Wheat), the Poplars along a river, the front of Rouen Cathedral, and — most famously of all — the water lilies of his garden at Giverny.

Within a single series the subject barely moves, yet no two canvases match. One stack glows pink at dawn; another goes blue and heavy under snow. The cathedral dissolves in morning haze on one canvas and blazes gold at midday on the next.

Why did he do it?

He did it to paint light and atmosphere rather than objects — the true subject of every series is the changing air itself. Monet noticed that a scene is never the same twice, so he set out to record its transformations hour by hour and season by season. The haystack, the church, the lily pond were simply stable stages on which the light could perform.

To keep up, he worked on many canvases at once, moving from one to the next as the sun shifted, sometimes racing the clock to catch an effect before it vanished. His letters describe the frustration and thrill of it — the way a cloud could undo a morning's work. It was Impressionism's founding idea, the fleeting moment, pushed to a rigorous, almost scientific extreme. (It's the same devotion to light that carried into his late, half-blind water lilies.)

Where can you see the series?

You can see one of the great gatherings of the Stacks of Wheat at the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds several from the series in a single collection. Standing among them, you watch a single field pass through fog, frost, and late-afternoon fire — time itself laid out along a wall.

If a trip is in your future, our guide to the can't-miss works at the Art Institute will point the way. Until then, line up two or three of Monet's stacks on DiscoverArt and let the light do what it did for him.