Haystacks in Provence

Van Gogh painted haystacks at Arles in the summer of 1888 as presences in the agricultural plain — golden geometric forms that the intense Provençal sun made almost sculptural in their solidity. He was aware that Monet had been approaching haystacks as serial subjects (the famous Haystacks series began in 1890–91), but Van Gogh's treatment is less concerned with the systematic optical variation of light across a consistent form than with the haystacks as participants in the landscape's emotional life. The Kröller-Müller's version shows the stacks in the particular warm-cool contrast of the Midi — yellow-gold against blue-violet distance — that Van Gogh had been developing through his colour-theory studies since Paris. The subject also connects to his Millet admiration: haystacks in Millet's paintings were the concentrated result of the harvest labour he had shown in earlier works, and their massive physical presence in the summer landscape carried that agricultural weight.

The haystacks are painted with dense, directional strokes that give the circular forms both mass and texture. Van Gogh's palette is intensely warm — yellows and golds against the blue-greens and purples of the surrounding landscape — creating the complementary contrast he had studied in color theory. The sky is rendered with his characteristic swirling energy.