Wheatfield with a Reaper

Wheatfield with a Reaper, held at the Van Gogh Museum, was painted in September 1889 from Van Gogh's window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy during a period of relative calm between his acute episodes. He wrote to Theo about the symbolic weight he found in the reaper — a figure of death, but one working in full sunlight, without any shadow of menace, cutting through golden grain. The image reframes mortality as natural process rather than catastrophe, a consolation Van Gogh seems to have genuinely found in the vision from his window.

The reaper figure is small and almost swallowed by the surrounding wheat, emphasising the vastness of the field against human scale. Van Gogh handles the grain with intense, swirling impasto in yellows and gold, while the hills beyond are rendered in undulating strokes of green and blue that curve with the landscape's contours.