Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn), Claude Monet; oil on canvas, roughly 28 x 40 in. (66 x 28 cm); in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which offers both zoomable and downloadable images on their site.
Here’s a question for you: in this painting by Monet — one of several in his series of paintings of haystacks — are the color relationships intense and vibrant or are they muted and subdued?
Could they be both?
Drawing on his extraordinary understanding of color as we sense it, Monet has juxtaposed blues and greens with complimentary oranges and reds to produce the effect of simultaneous contrast, a visual phenomenon with which he and the other Impressionist painters became fascinated after reading Michel Eugéne Chevreul’s On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors.
This effect intensifies the vibrance of the color as we perceive it — even if the pigments themselves are not bright and intense.
The use of simultaneous contrast was a common technique in many Impressionist paintings. Here, Monet has combined it with very low value contrast, much as he did in his earlier painting Impression Sunrise (from which the originally derogatory term “Impressionism” was derived by a hostile journalist).
I’ve rendered the image in grayscale at bottom, so you can see the subdued values. This combination has a unique effect on our perception, as outlined in my post on Values in Monet’s Impression Sunrise.
In his desire to convey the visual impression of the end of an Autumn day, Monet has used the color contrast effect in both the landscape and the sky.
