Wheat fields

Van Gogh made several painting excursions during visits to the landscape around Arles. He made paintings of harvests, wheat fields and other rural landmarks of the area, At various points, Van Gogh painted the view from his window – at The Hague, Antwerp, and Paris. These works culminated in The Wheat Field series, which depicted the view from his cells in the asylum at Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh was captivated by the fields in May when the wheat was young and green. His Wheatfields at Auvers with White House shows a more subdued palette of yellows and blues, which creates a sense of idyllic harmony. About 10 July 1890, Van Gogh wrote to Theo of “vast fields of wheat under troubled skies”. Wheatfield with Crows shows the artist’s state of mind in his final days. During his stay at the asylum he made about twelve paintings of the view of the enclosed wheat field and distant mountains.

A relaxed version of the Harvest series, this painting shows a clever use of colours to depict the heat and dryness during summer in Arles. Harvest in Provence is also referred to as the Corn Harvest of Provence or the Grain Harvest of Provence. The painting shows harvested wheat and a farmer engrossed in his work in the foreground with houses and trees in the background.. He differentiated his brushstrokes, seen here in the spiky cut cornfield contrasted against the flat area of standing corn, and was applying his paint in great thick strokes that lend the picture plane a textural quality.

Wheat Field with Crows, depicts a dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows over a wheat field. A sense of isolation is heightened by a central path leading nowhere and by the uncertain direction of flight of the crows. Jules Michelet, one of van Gogh’s favorite authors, wrote of crows: “They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and sage a bird.” Kathleen Erickson finds the painting as expressing both sorrow and a sense of his life coming to an end. The crows are used by van Gogh as a symbol of death and rebirth, or of resurrection. The road, in contrasting colors of red and green, is said by Erickson to be a metaphor for a sermon he gave based on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress where the pilgrim is sorrowful that the road is so long, yet rejoices because the Eternal City waits at the journey’s end.