As the artist responsible for creating the first work deemed impressionist, Monet’s oil painting “Haystacks (Sunset)” painting imbues many of the tenets central to impressionism. The medium in itself speaks to a deviation from the status quo of realism given that oil paint was traditionally used as the primary agent of rendering nature in the most technically accurate manner possible.  Inversely, Haystacks (Sunset) features oil paint that has been applied with visible brush strokes and unmixed pigments such that the viewer’s eyes are left to do the mixing.  This intimate experience between viewer and artwork also points to the painting’s immediacy; given the viewer’s active role, the painting as observed by viewers only exists within the time increment in which it is being perceived.  The color palette is primarily muted so the crimson pigments used in the haystack appear the most saturated. While the eye is typically drawn to more saturated tones, the detail applied to the haystack is equal to if not less than the amount attention paid to the background. As such, the eye tends to reside on the haystack last as an obtrusive object-seeming shape in a cooler and mellow environment.  Furthermore, the eye understands foreground, mid ground, and background by the colors’ values and hues, in addition to the dispersal of paint strokes, rather than through recognition of spatiality based on preconceived understanding of perspective.  The seemingly smooth but objectively unblended transition between the darker green and yellow hues in the foreground to the muted pinks, oranges, and blues of the mid and background inform the composition’s arrangement.  As the composition recedes into the background, Monet’s seemingly thinner brushstrokes and decline in diversity of hues utilized work to convey a more homogenous space, unlike the grass-seeming texture in the foreground that contains a variety of blues, greens, grays, and purples, likely conveying the haystack’s shadow.  Finally, Monet’s choice of subject seems to pay homage to the manmade aspect of agrarian lifestyles as he paints the haystack in the same romantic style used in the naturally occurring environment behind the haystack- a style that has become iconic in impressionist painting’s idyllic landscapes.  The haystack’s deviation in hue from the landscape but more or less consistency in saturation imply a type of simpatico or even seamless relationship between manmade infrastructure and nature, a motif common among impressionist artists entering the industrial era.