Monet was intensely aware of and fascinated by the visual nuances of the region's landscape and by the endless variations in the days and in the seasons—the stacks were just outside his door.

In reality they stored sheafs of grain primarily for bread—so wheat [or possibly barley or oats]—and not hay, an animal food.

[15] The local method of storing and drying unthreshed-grains was to use straw, or sometimes hay, as a thatched 'roof' for the stack, shielding the wheat, barley or oats from the elements until, once dry-enough, they could be threshed.

The shapes of stacks were regional: in Normandy, where Giverny is situated, it was common for them to be round with quite steeply-pitched thatched 'roofs'—just as Monet painted.

Noticing the way the light changed on M. Quéruel's stacks, Monet asked his stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé, to bring him two canvases, one for sunny and one for overcast conditions.

[17] Monet's daily routine therefore came to involve carting paints, easels and many unfinished canvases back and forth, working on whichever canvas most closely resembled the scene of the moment as the conditions and light fluctuated.

Although he began painting the stacks en plein air, Monet later revised his initial impressions in his studio, both to generate contrast and to preserve the harmony within the series.

[19] His earlier landscapes (Wildenstein Index Number 900–995, 1073) had included stacks [and also some more-accurately described hayricks: that is smaller piles of hay for animal-feed] in an ancillary manner.

The general consensus is that only the canvases produced using the 1890 harvest (Wildenstein Index Number 1266–1290) comprise the Haystacks series proper.

[7] Monet's Haystacks series is one of his earliest to rely on repetition to illustrate nuances in his perception across natural variations such as times of day, seasons, and types of weather.

This concept enabled Monet to use repetition to show nuances of perception as the time of day, the seasons and the weather changed.

[18] Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, Monet focused on Haystacks and a number of other subjects (other series included the Mornings on the Seine, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, and the Water Lilies, among others).

In order to work on many paintings virtually simultaneously, he would awake before dawn so as to begin at the earliest time of day: ... for the Early Mornings on the Seine series, he chose to paint at and before dawn, which made it 'an easier subject and simpler lighting than usual', because at this time of day the effects did not change so rapidly; however, this involved him getting up at 3:30 a.m., which seems to have been unprecedented even for so inveterate an early riser as Monet.

[27] Kandinsky's memoirs refer to the series: "What suddenly became clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, which I had not understood before and which surpassed my wildest dreams.

From the 1888 harvest, Monet produced three canvases featuring two stacks each (Wildenstein #'s 1213–5) against the backdrop of hills along the left bank of the Seine and a few Giverny houses to the right.

Climate activists threw mashed potatoes at the painting in October 2022, but it was not damaged and was cleaned and put back on display.