Monet's Haystacks series, painted between 1890 and 1891, was among the defining statements of Impressionist method — a demonstration that the same subject, revisited across different conditions of light and atmosphere, could yield an inexhaustible range of pictorial experience. When Roy Lichtenstein produced his own Haystack series in 1969, he adopted the same subject and the same serial logic and replaced everything else. Haystack #1 (C.65), rendered in flat yellow with a Ben-Day dot ground, makes the substitution immediately legible: this is Monet's motif processed through the graphic language of commercial printing.

The haystack in Haystack #1 (C.65) sits in a field of pure yellow, its form indicated by the underlying lithographic line while the surface is structured by the mechanical regularity of the dot pattern. There is no atmosphere, no variation of light across the surface, no evidence of the artist's hand — only the impersonal mark of the screen. The contrast with Monet's dissolving, colour-saturated surfaces is total and deliberate.

Lichtenstein's Haystack series was part of a sustained engagement with Impressionism that also produced the Cathedral prints of the same year. Together these series formed the most direct art-historical argument of his career to that point: that the Impressionist project, for all its claims about unmediated perception, was as much a system of conventions as the commercial illustration Lichtenstein had been examining since the early 1960s. Haystack #1 (C.65) opens that argument with characteristic directness — a work that is at once immediately legible and, on reflection, genuinely unsettling in what it implies about the relationship between seeing and representation.
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