A Wheatfield, with Cypresses

Van Gogh's A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, now at the National Gallery in London, is one of the most celebrated works in British art collections. Painted at Saint-Rémy in June 1889, it represents his iconic compositional formula at its most resolved: rolling wheat under a turbulent sky with a monumental cypress in the middle ground and distant mountains beyond. The National Gallery acquired this painting and it has become one of the best-known and best-loved works in the collection, instantly recognizable to millions of visitors. Van Gogh's ability to charge a simple agricultural landscape with extraordinary emotional intensity is nowhere more evident.

The composition is a masterclass in Van Gogh's mature technique: the wheat field is painted in horizontal undulating strokes of gold and green, the cypress in spiraling vertical marks, and the clouds in sweeping arcs of white and blue-gray. The mountains behind are rendered with cooler, more atmospheric strokes. Every passage of the painting vibrates with contained energy, yet the composition holds together with remarkable cohesion.