Wheatfield

Wheatfield painted in Arles in 1888 is one of several works in which Van Gogh explored the vast agricultural plains surrounding the city during the high summer harvest. The ripening wheat — golden, almost orange under the Provençal sun — represented for Van Gogh a symbol of life's abundance and also of mortality, a connection he would make more explicitly in his final Auvers paintings two years later. In this earlier version the mood is still affirmative: the grain stands tall, the sky is brilliant, and the composition breathes with the vitality that the south had restored to him after the exhausting Paris years.

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.