In an unassuming field in the French village of Giverny stand two conical haystacks. In France, bales such as these store grain for bread, wintry pantries holding human food instead of the expected chaff or fodder. The grain's flaxen gold is suffused with pink and purple strokes. The light is soft. It could be dawn, or dusk, or even midday. The haystacks cast lavender shapes on the snowy ground—cool shadows littered with yellow, like crocuses breaking through a snowbank. In the background, violet stalks of grain kiss a pale pink sky. A slight fog dampens the brightness of the snow. Despite this, despite the barren coolness of the sky, the painting is irradiated with warmth. The warmth of the sun is palpable even through the chill of winter. The haystacks almost seem to be glowing, ringed with subtle halos. So can the mundane seem so divine in the light of the sun.
Though an additional five works of the same subject matter predate them, Claude Monet lovingly frames haystacks as his subjects in an official series of 25. The series captures the transience of light: through the different times of day and the changing seasons. Monet painted the haystacks, including those of Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) (1891), en plein air. He worked on many of the paintings simultaneously, often relying on memory to finish when the sunlight inevitably changed as the sun moved across the sky.
Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) is the only one of its series to hang in New York. It seems almost unremarkable in the European Painting wing of the Metropolitan, among portraits of powdered noblewomen and depictions of heavenly choruses. And yet this painting—hung inside a gilded frame almost more eye-catching as the piece itself—captured me like no other. It was like being hypnotized.
Claude Monet perceived a moment in the winter of 1891 that he decided to tenderly preserve—a mundane moment thought precious enough to enshrine for eternity. Perhaps not eternity – civilizations fall, paint fades, paper decays. Even if the painting survived for billions of years, it would eventually return to whence it came – the sun, the very origin of the enchanting light in the painting. The very mechanism through which humanity can live in light instead of darkness, in its death throes, would consume everything in the solar system in a fiery death. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And yet, even if this painting miraculously survived the death of the sun, the universe itself is not eternal (or so astrophysicists say). The fate awaiting everything in the known universe is called heat-death – a state of maximum entropy, where black holes have consumed all light, where there is no sound and no light and no more potential for anything.
But heat-death is of no concern to these two haystacks. They are not haystacks at all, not anymore. They are simply paintings of haystacks. As Mark Doty describes in “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon,” “…description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.” A vision of haystacks glimpsed one winter’s day is transformed into an ode of love to light itself. According to Newton’s first law, light can travel uninterrupted into infinity. And yet its trajectory changes on Earth; sunlight scatters on surfaces or is reflected into space by the albedo effect of snow and ice and clouds. And some sunlight ends its long journey as it bounces off objects and into the eyes of people such as Claude Monet. And Monet repaid its sacrifice, canonizing the sunlight of that day, holy for just the moment that a passing museum goer takes a glance. It is defiance to heat-death.
Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) is about the transience of light, yet it traps light for just a moment longer than humanity is meant to see. For Monet, it is both a moment preserved in time and a piece of legacy. A defiance against death, to be known in nothingness, in the dark. It is a protest. Why must the light we see be transient? Why must we let it pass by, let it destroy itself in scattering, or continue its journey to the end of the universe, to heat-death? Humanity strives to defy the dark: fire, light bulbs, even solar panels harnessing sunlight to power our streetlights. And Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) is yet another one of these small rebellions against our inevitable fate. A mere painting of two haystacks, a psalm of light written in strokes of paint, is a brief attempt to upset the cosmic order. In the poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”, “rage”, writes poet Dylan Thomas, “rage, against the dying of the light.”
Gina Lew is a rising junior in the SVA Illustration class of 2025. "Just as I equally appreciate paintings of fantastical sci-fi scenes and more mundane still lives," Gina says, "I also enjoy both fiction and nonfiction writing. I strongly believe a visual artist's mind is nurtured not only by other works of visual art but also by science, literature, and the humanities. As a child, I was always fascinated by the decadently descriptive prose in Brian Jacques' Redwall series and the humor of Terry Pratchett's Discworld. More recently, I've been enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle. As for nonfiction books, Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life and Patrik Svensson's The Book of Eels were both great. I didn't intend for this to come off as a book recommendation, but I guess it's safe to assume the readers of this publication like to read in some capacity. I know I'll be reading throughout the summer!"