Monet's Early Haystack in Chezy Becomes Seed for Later Haystack Series
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
Claude Monet’s early landscape “Haystack at Chézy” (1875), on display in San Diego and loaned from Seoul’s Sejong Museum, shows the young artist before he developed his signature Impressionist brushwork. At 23 Monet painted the field near the Forest of Fontainebleau (퐁텐블로 숲) under the influence of the Barbizon painters, depicting sunset colors and heavy haystacks (건초더미) placed like rocks. Though this work lacks the quick strokes and light-reflection effects of later Impressionism, it represents Monet’s experiments in plein air painting (야외 사생). After a Salon rejection two years later he pursued a new path that led to the famous Haystack series (건초더미 연작, 1890–91), where he painted large canvases of stacked hay, exploring color changes with the sun and exhibiting many variations together. Monet kept his youthful “Haystack at Chézy” in his studio for life and passed it to his son; museums now use it to trace his artistic development.
