Antique French Oil on Board, Haystacks in a Field

Period
Early 20th century, French

Size
14½ x 12¼ inches, framed

An oil on board, in a limed softwood frame with a white-painted inner slip.

Four haystacks standing in a field, a meadow crossed by a track in front of them, and a tree at the right. The strokes run long and wavy in places and short and hooked in others, through the sky and the field alike. The warm tan of the unprimed board reads through, particularly in the gray of the sky and the green of the field.

There is cracking in the sky at the upper right, a pale line below it, and small losses where the board shows. The frame is worn, with the mitres opening slightly at the corners.

Historical Context
The shadows are violet and blue rather than darker green and the colors sit side by side unmixed, which is Impressionist practice. The stacks hold their form as flat simplified shapes with clean edges, which belongs to the generation after, who kept the color and gave the structure back.

Stacks like these were built in the field after harvest and shaped to shed rain, standing until the hay was wanted, and they were a fixture of the French countryside before baling. Field stacks recur through French landscape painting. The picture is a pochade, a small oil made on board in front of the subject, which is why painters carried boards at all: rigid, light and needing no stretcher.