page_title: The Wheat Field
section_title: Fall and winter, 1889
hierarchical_section_title: The Wheat Field / Fall and winter, 1889
context_page_description: The Wheat Field is a series of oil paintings executed by Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. All of them depict the view Van Gogh had from the window of his bedroom on the top floor of the asylum: a field enclosed by stone walls just beneath his window and excluded from normal life by the rear wall of the asylum grounds; beyond this enclosure farm land, accompanied by olive groves and vineyards, ran up to the hills at the foot of the mountain range called Les Alpilles.
  From May 1889 to May 1890, Van Gogh recorded this view in changing settings: after a storm, with a reaper in the field, with fresh wheat raising in autumn and with flowers in the spring. This is one of Van Gogh's major series from Saint-Rémy, comprising wonderful works such as the Wheat Field at Sunrise in the Kröller-Müller Museum. Van Gogh included the Enclosed Field with Rising Sun made in December 1889 in his Display at Les XX 1890 in Brussels.
  Van Gogh worked on a group of paintings "The Wheat Field" that he could see from his cell at Saint-Paul Hospital. From the studio room he could see a field of wheat, enclosed by a wall. Beyond that were the mountains from Arles.
context_section_description: In September Van Gogh worked on Wheat Field behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper. Intending to paint a pure sulfur yellow, he wrote to Émile Bernard that he had taken up the "devil of a question of yellow".  He explained to his brother Theo, "I see in this reaper – an undefined figure, struggling in the intense heat like the devil to finish his work – I see him as an image of death in the sense that the humans are the corn that is being cut down. So it is, if you will, the opposite of the sowing that I tried earlier. But this death is not sad, it takes place in bright light with a sun that covers everything with a light like pure gold."
  Rain also called Enclosed Wheat Field in the Rain is unique to Van Gogh's work in the South. He represented falling rain by diagonal lines of paint.  The style is reminiscent of Japanese prints, but the effect is stylistically personal to Van Gogh.
  In December Van Gogh made Wheat Field with a Rising Sun, held in a private collection. The work, started in late November, shows a sunrise above a field of young wheat in the complementary colors of yellow-green and purple.  Deep furrows run towards the enclosed wall behind which is a row of purple hills. The sun is surrounded by a large yellow halo.  Van Gogh sough to "express calmness, great peace".  Further, he expresses "without making direct reference to the actual Gethsemane... and there is no need to portray figures from the Sermon on the Mount in order to express a comforting and gentle motif."  It was one of the six canvases he selected for the exhibit at Les Vingt [XX] in Brussels in 1890.
caption: Enclosed Field with Rising Sun also The Wheat Field, December 1889, Private Collection (F737)
exif: {}