Harvest at La Crau, with Montmajour in the Background

Painted in June 1888 near the ruined Montmajour abbey east of Arles, this panoramic harvest landscape is the most ambitious single canvas of Van Gogh's Arles period and the one he declared — in a letter to Theo — his 'best landscape to date.' He had climbed to a high viewpoint to capture the full breadth of La Crau, the flat alluvial plain below Arles, in its moment of maximum agricultural intensity: the hay harvest in progress, haystacks scattered, figures working, the distant town of Arles and the Alpilles mountains completing the horizon. The work engages directly with the Flemish and Dutch tradition of the panoramic harvest landscape — Bruegel's Harvesters was in his mind, as were Millet's agricultural figures — while transforming the genre through his Provençal palette of blazing yellows and deep blues. Van Gogh was also in correspondence with Bernard and Gauguin about the direction of Post-Impressionist painting, and this canvas represents his most considered contribution to that debate. Now at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The composition is divided into precise horizontal bands of colour — golden stubble, green orchards, the pale road, blue mountains, sky — creating an almost abstract zonal structure. Every area is painted with different, appropriate stroke types: short strokes for cut grain, long undulating marks for distant orchards. Impasto is thick throughout, the surface a record of sustained, energised effort.