Wheat Field behind Saint-Paul 's Hospital with a Reaper

Wheat Field behind Saint-Paul's Hospital with a Reaper at the Museum Folkwang in Essen is one of Van Gogh's most explicitly symbolic works, and the one whose meaning he articulated most precisely to Theo. He described the reaper as 'an image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping — so it's the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.' The Museum Folkwang, founded in Hagen in 1902 by Karl Ernst Osthaus as one of Europe's first museums dedicated to contemporary art, was among the institutions most aggressively defamed by the Nazi 'degenerate art' campaign of 1937 — several Van Gogh works were seized from its collection. This canvas survived and remains one of the museum's defining works.

Van Gogh builds the wheat field through intense, swirling strokes of gold and yellow that convey both the physical abundance of the harvest and its psychological weight. The small figure of the reaper is almost lost in the vast golden field, while the enclosing walls of the asylum grounds create a contained, claustrophobic space. The paint is applied with furious energy.