Meadow with yellow flowers

Meadow with Yellow Flowers at the Winterthur Museum of Art was painted at Saint-Rémy during one of Van Gogh's supervised excursions into the countryside surrounding the asylum. The meadow ablaze with yellow wildflowers — dandelions, ragwort, or the various yellow composites of the Provençal spring — gave him subject matter that expressed his most fundamental chromatic conviction: that yellow, the color of sunlight and warmth, was the color of happiness, the color he associated most strongly with the life force he was trying to preserve against his illness. He used yellow throughout his work — the Sunflowers, the ripe wheat fields, the blazing sun of the Sower paintings — as the color of creative energy and natural abundance, and a meadow of yellow wildflowers was a natural landscape counterpart to those cultivated yellow subjects. The Winterthur Museum of Art (Museum Kunst Palast) holds this as part of the substantial Swiss holdings of Post-Impressionist painting that reflect the early twentieth-century Swiss collecting tradition. For Van Gogh, the yellow meadow was also a survival: evidence that the natural world continued its annual cycles of flowering regardless of the human crises that had confined him to the asylum.

Van Gogh renders the meadow in dense, short strokes of varying yellows and greens, creating a vibratory surface texture that seems to pulse with light. The sky above is cooler in tone, providing contrast. The brushwork is uniform in energy but varies in direction, giving the meadow an undulating, breathing quality.