UPDATE: Rare Monet Haystacks Painting Shatters Auction Records

Originally published 5/9/19: May brings a slew of exciting sales to the major auction houses. From Impressionists to Modernists and contemporary art, the month is marked by big names and even bigger numbers.

Leading Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on May 14 is a rare masterpiece from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series. Meules (French for ‘stacks’) from 1890 is one of 25 canvasses the artist painted on the subject. Though there are many of these paintings, they are among his most prized works, and rarely come up at auction. Other works in the series are housed at some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Musee d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Created in the early 1890s, Monet found inspiration in the fields neighboring his home in rural Giverny. The piles of harvested wheat, stacked and awaiting threshing, were seen by some as common, boring subject matter. But through Monet’s eyes they became monuments to the incredible changing effects of light and the seasons on the natural world. Painting en plein air, Monet had a rotating stash of canvasses that he would work on, changing them out depending on the time of day and weather. Now one of his most famous and valued series, Haystacks shows his keen eye for the changes of light and atmosphere, and his ability to elevate a mundane subject matter to a thing of incredible beauty.

One of only eight Haystacks canvasses still in private hands, the work is estimated to fetch $55 million at auction. The current record for the artist at auction is $84.7 million, a mark this sale could easily surpass. The auction also features a few more Monet works, as well as several late Picasso portraits, and works from Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec, amongst others. Stay tuned to Art & Object for coverage of these upcoming sales, which are sure to inspire fierce competition at auction.