Wheatfield

This 1888 Arles wheat field belongs to the sustained series of agricultural plain paintings Van Gogh produced in his first full Provençal summer, when the ripening grain under the blazing Midi sun seemed to him to embody everything the south offered that the north had withheld. He had been thinking about wheat fields since his earliest Nuenen studies of sheaves and harvesters, but the Arles plain — vast, flat, luminous, shimmering in the summer heat — transformed the familiar agricultural subject into something approaching the sublime. Writing to Theo, he described the standing wheat as nearly orange in the direct southern light, the colour demanding a palette that his Dutch training had never equipped him for. The series also connects to his Millet admiration: where Millet placed figures of labour within the grain, Van Gogh often removed them entirely, making the wheat itself the subject — animate, vibrating, implicitly symbolic of growth and death. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The wheat is rendered in short, curving strokes of yellow and ochre that convey both the movement of grain in wind and the shimmering effect of heat on colour. Van Gogh differentiates the foreground stalks — individually brushed with warm impasto — from the receding mid-ground, which is handled more loosely.