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Title: Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning (Meules, Effet de Neige, Le Matin) Artist/Maker: Claude Monet (French, 1840 - 1926) Culture: French Place: France (Place created) Date: 1891 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 64.8 × 99.7 cm (25 1/2 × 39 1/4 in.) Signed: Signed and dated, lower left: "Claude Monet 91" Alternate Titles: Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning (Display Title) Department: Paintings Classification: Paintings Object Type: Painting Object Number: 95.PA.63 In the fall of 1890, Impressionist Claude Monet arranged to have the wheatstacks near his home left out over the winter. By the following summer he had painted them at least thirty times, at different times throughout the seasons. Wheatstacks was Monet's first series and the first in which he concentrated on a single subject, differentiating pictures only by color, touch, composition, and lighting and weather conditions. He said, "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." After beginning outdoors, Monet reworked each painting in his studio to create the color harmonies that unify each canvas. The pinks in the sky echo the snow's reflections, and the blues of the wheatstacks' shadows are found in the wintry light shining on the stacks, in the houses' roofs, and in the snowy earth. With raised, broken brushstrokes, Monet captured nuances of light and created a solid, geometric structure that prevents the surface from simply melting into blobs. The wheatstacks are solid forms, and, while the outlying houses are indecipherable close-up, they are clear from a distance. Text from: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/900/claude-monet-wheatstacks-snow-effect-morning-meules-effet-de-neige-le-matin-french-1891

Title: The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light Artist/Maker: Claude Monet (French, 1840 - 1926) Culture: French Place: France (Place created) Date: 1894 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 100.3 × 65.1 cm (39 1/2 × 25 5/8 in.) Signed: Signed and dated, lower left: "Claude Monet 94" Alternate Titles: Le Portail (Effet du Matin) (Alternate Title) Department: Paintings Classification: Paintings Object Type: Painting Object Number: 2001.33 "Everything changes, even stone." Claude Monet wrote these words in a letter and vividly demonstrated them in paint, conveying a wondrous combination of permanence and mutability as the sun daily transformed the facade of Rouen Cathedral. Extending the building's encrusted stone surface to the richly varied impasto surface of his painting, he portrayed the cathedral perpetually re-emerging in the suffused light of early morning. Monet created several groups of paintings exploring the color, light, and form of a single subject at various times of day, but his Rouen Cathedral series was his most intense effort on a single site. He painted there in late winter in both 1892 and 1893, then reworked his thirty canvases from memory in the studio through 1894. He began this example in 1893, working in an improvised studio in the front room of a dressmaker's shop across from the cathedral. After creating a coherent ensemble, Monet selected twenty paintings that he considered "complete" and "perfect," including this one, for an exhibition at his Paris dealer's gallery in May 1895. Pissarro and Cézanne visited and praised the series, and patrons quickly purchased eight paintings from the group. Text from: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/131471/claude-monet-the-portal-of-rouen-cathedral-in-morning-light-french-1894

Title: Starry Night Artist/Maker: Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863 - 1944) Culture: Norwegian Date: 1893 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 135.6 × 140 cm (53 3/8 × 55 1/8 in.) Signed: Lower left: "EMunch" Department: Paintings Classification: Paintings Object Type: Painting Object Number: 84.PA.681  This night landscape represents the coastline at Åsgårdstrand, a small beach resort south of Oslo in Norway, where Edvard Munch spent his summers from the 1880s onward. Here Munch tried to capture the emotions called forth by the night rather than to record its picturesque qualities. The color blue conveys the mysticism and melancholy of the landscape, which seems full of premonitions. An abstract mound at the right represents a clump of trees; a white fence runs diagonally in front. The vaguely defined shape on the fence may be a shadow of two lovers, a recurring theme in Munch's work. He used an undulating line to depict the shoreline that continues into the trees at the right. Stars reflect in the water, and a flash of light in the trees shines brightly. Varying thicknesses of blue and green paint are blended together to form the impression of a night sky. Some areas are thickly painted, while others are left bare to convey the lighter segments of the sky or a celestial phenomenon. Text from: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/750/edvard-munch-starry-night-norwegian-1893