Landscape with wheat sheaves and rising moon

Painted at Saint-Rémy in July 1889 during a period of relative stability between acute episodes, this twilight scene of wheat sheaves against a rising moon connects the asylum landscape to the peasant subjects Van Gogh had painted since his Nuenen years. The sheaf was for him inseparably associated with Millet, whose monumental Gleaners and Harvesters had established the harvest as a subject of secular grandeur, and Van Gogh's Saint-Rémy versions of the motif carry that inheritance while embedding it in his most personal symbolic framework: the moon as a symbol of the night's consolation, the wheat as the cycle of life and death that made mortality bearable by making it universal. He was simultaneously working on a series of copies after Millet at this time, translating the older artist's black-and-white engravings into oil colour in a practice that served both as technical exercise and spiritual homage. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo holds an extraordinary concentration of his Saint-Rémy work.

The painting is structured around the cool yellow disc of the moon rising against a deep blue sky, its light silhouetting the conical wheat sheaves below. Short, curved strokes animate the sky with movement while the foreground is built with more anchored, upward brushwork. The colour scheme of blue and yellow — Van Gogh's most characteristic complementary pairing — dominates the entire composition.