Wheat Field with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1889
A field of ripe wheat rolls like the sea under a sky of coiling white clouds, and on the right two dark cypresses rise like green flames against the blue of the Alpilles hills. Van Gogh painted the scene in the summer of 1889 from the fields outside the asylum at Saint Rémy in Provence, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown in Arles. It was, he told his brother, one of his best summer landscapes, and he was so pleased with it that he made two further versions, one now in London and one in a private collection.
Everything in the picture moves. The wheat is a mass of short yellow strokes leaning in the wind, the olive trees in the middle distance are bunches of grey green curls, the clouds are drawn in swirling ribbons of white and pale blue, and the mountains ripple as if they were alive. The cypresses, painted in thick, almost sculpted paint, anchor the whole composition. Van Gogh wrote that the cypress had never been painted as he saw it, as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk, and he made it his personal emblem of Provence.
The canvas came to the Met in 1993 from the collection of Walter Annenberg, the publisher and ambassador who gave the museum a large group of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings. It hangs among the other Van Goghs, including the self portrait in a straw hat and the irises, in galleries that together form one of the finest concentrations of his work outside Amsterdam.
Did You Know? Van Gogh painted this canvas outdoors in a single burst, and later copied it carefully in his studio so that his mother and sister could have a version.
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