Sheaves of Wheat in a Field

Sheaves of Wheat in a Field (1885) at the Kröller-Müller Museum places Van Gogh directly in dialogue with Millet's canonical harvest imagery — the bound sheaves standing in the field as the most complete image of agricultural labour's result, the year's work gathered and secured. He had been studying Millet's engravings and paintings through reproductions and through the prints he was collecting, and the sheaf subject was among the most charged in the older artist's vocabulary. In Nuenen, Van Gogh observed the actual wheat harvest and painted the sheaves as documentary subjects rather than allegorical ones — though the layers of association with Millet's peasant heroism inevitably accompanied his observation of the actual Brabant fields. The dark, earthy palette appropriate to the subject's sombre dignity was still the basis of his practice, unchanged in its fundamental character from his earliest Nuenen still lifes. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

The sheaves are rendered with directional brushwork that captures their bundled, upright forms and the texture of dried straw. Van Gogh's dark Dutch palette uses yellows and ochres for the wheat against darker earthy backgrounds. The composition is relatively simple, the sheaves filling the middle ground of a flat field.