Harvest at La Crau, with Montmajour in the Background

Painted in June 1888 at La Crau near Arles, this panoramic harvest scene is one of Van Gogh's most ambitious Arles landscapes. He had climbed to a high point near the ruined abbey of Montmajour to capture the full breadth of the harvest plain, with haystacks, the distant town of Arles, and the craggy Alpilles mountains filling the distance. Writing to Theo, he called it his best landscape to date. The Van Gogh Museum holds this work, which shows the extraordinary ambition of the Arles period and his full command of the southern landscape.

The composition is divided into precise horizontal bands of colour — golden stubble, green orchards, the pale road, blue mountains, sky — creating an almost abstract zonal structure. Every area is painted with different, appropriate stroke types: short strokes for cut grain, long undulating marks for distant orchards. Impasto is thick throughout, the surface a record of sustained, energised effort.