The Red Vineyard

The Red Vineyard holds a unique place in Van Gogh's biography as the only painting he is documented to have sold during his lifetime — purchased by the Belgian Symbolist painter Anna Boch at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels in January 1890 for 400 francs. He painted it after witnessing a precise meteorological event near Montmajour in November 1888: a vineyard at sunset when the raking light turned the vines a deep, saturated red — what he described to Theo as 'all red like red wine.' The image is simultaneously documentary and visionary: an actual observed phenomenon transfigured by the intensity of Van Gogh's colour response. The vineyard workers gathering the harvest connect it to the Millet tradition of agricultural labour, but the chromatic explosion of saturated vermilion under a gold sky moves far beyond anything Millet attempted. The painting is now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which acquired it through the collection of Ivan Morozov in the early twentieth century.

Saturated vermilion and crimson dominate the vineyard, set against a glowing yellow-orange sky and violet shadows. The figures are loosely indicated with dark strokes. Paint is applied in swirling, interlocked brushstrokes that animate the entire surface with rhythmic energy.