Monet paints these series from nature.  He is said to take with him in a carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to hour, taking them up again the next day.  He notes, for example, from nine to ten o’clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick; at ten o’clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study until eleven o’clock.  Thus he follows step by step the modifications of the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of the whole series.  He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different.  He exhibits them together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history of light playing upon one and the same object.  It is a dazzling display of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation.  Light is certainly the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter.  One can see the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric vitality.  The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange, predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights, just as it actually happens in optic science.  There are some midday scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette—­tree, hay-rick, or rock—­is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as he would in actual sunlight.  Sometimes even there are no more shadows at all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create contrasts of colours.  Everything is light, and the painter seems easily to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.

[Illustration:  CLAUDE MONET

THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]

Generally he finds a very simple motif sufficient; a hay-rick, some slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs.  But he also proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater complexity.  Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river, or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun.  All this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or fiery symphony of the luminous atoms.  The most unexpected tones play in the foliage.  On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a