With the advent of capitalism and the bourgeois fascination with financial speculation in the nineteenth century, dealers became an indispensable part of the art industry. Paul Durand-Ruel, a dealer closely associated with the Impressionists, was one of the most successful speculators of his time. That he readily assumed the enormous risk and financial insecurity of dealing Impressionist paintings when the reputations of their painters had not yet been established showed his aptitude as an entrepreneur.

However, although dealers practiced much speculation, they were unwilling to take unnecessary risks to promote avant garde art. A means of making speculative investments in art more secure was the capitalist concept of mass production, also known as serial production. Serial production grew in popularity in the nineteenth century with the help of the development of lithography, a method of planographic printing cheap enough for reproduction in mass-circulated newspapers. The mass production model had some of its roots in the cotton industry, in which a fixed amount of capital was used to develop a homogenous product that returned significant profits; the method decreased the financial risk associated with speculation to a certain extent. Other industries adopted this approach, including the silk industry of Lyons, whose guiding principles were specialization and efficiency.

Dealers and artists, too, used mass production to decrease speculative risk; Claude Monet’s Haystacks series is a prime example. By 1890, Monet’s artwork had become reliable investments, and his paintings were selling quickly for very high prices. Financially secure and confident in his ability to sell his work, Monet took a page from the serial production of industrial goods to efficiently create homogenous paintings; he could specialize in haystacks or water lilies or cathedrals or poplars, churning them out in mass quantities.

Monet's Haystacks series consists of paintings that are almost exactly alike, using the theme of repetition to show disparities in the impression of light at different times of day, kinds of weather, and seasons. He captures the ephemeral changes of nature on the same scene. The sky is tinted blue in one and burning bright orange in another; the shadow of the haystack falls to the left in one and to the right in another; the ground is covered with grass in one and with snow in another.

But these slight variations on the theme are but small changes to a repetitive image. Serial painting dispenses with many artistic choices in favor of efficiency. No longer did Monet choose his subject and style for every painting he did; the decisions had already been made. For most paintings in the series, there would be two haystacks depicted—the one in the foreground slightly bigger than the one in the background, each casting a shadow on the ground; there would be hills behind the haystacks and, above them, a strip of sky.

The repetitive Haystacks series, as expected, sold very well. Fifteen of the twenty-five paintings in the series were exhibited by Durand-Ruel in May 1891 and sold almost immediately, fetching an average price of about 1,000 francs. Monet was very well aware of the commercial nature of this serial production; he wrote that he needed “these valuable commodities, these mass productions” for his dealers. Fellow Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro considered his series to be financially motivated and referred to it as “art de vente,” or art made specifically for sale. (This statement is a bit hypocritical of Degas, whose serial production of ballet scenes—though not as repetitive as Monet’s—still relied on the same principle of homogeneity.) Pissarro criticized Monet’s Haystacks series by saying, “I do not know how it does not bother Monet to constrain himself to this repetition—here are the terrible effects of success!”

Excerpted from my art history paper, "Impressionism, Inc.--The Effect of Capitalism on Nineteenth-Century Art"