Monet's shadows are not grey
In the wheat-stack series the darkest part of the picture is also the most colourful. Here is what he was doing.
Draft copy. This piece was written during the site build and is waiting on an editorial pass — the facts are checked, the prose is not final.
Go to the wheat-stack paintings expecting agricultural scenes and you will find colour theory.
The shadow side of the large stack is violet and blue-green. The shadow it throws across the stubble is that same violet, laid over orange. There is no black in it and no brown. The darkest region of the painting is also one of its most saturated.
Why violet
Low sunlight is warm — yellow to orange. A surface turned away from it is lit by the sky instead, which is blue. And the eye, having been staring at orange stubble, produces an afterimage in orange’s complement, which is blue-violet. Monet painted the shadow the colour his eye reported rather than the colour an object “is”.
The series as an argument
He painted twenty-five of these across one autumn and winter, and exhibited fifteen together in 1891. The point of showing them as a group is that the subject never changes, so everything that differs between the canvases is light. It is the cleanest statement of the Impressionist case anyone made, and it sold out almost immediately.
On the gallery
The paintings in this piece
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Art Institute of Chicago
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