1888 -1890 · Arles, Saint-Rémy, Auvers and painting of the cycle of the seasons

From the burning yellow of Arles to the greens of Auvers, Van Gogh makes the wheat field a living organism: sowing, growing, mowing and starting again connect human work, the seasons and the intensity of the landscape.

Vincent van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853 and became an artist after several professional and religious experiences. His attention to peasants, working the land and the cycle of the seasons appeared in the Dutch years. When he moved to Arles in February 1888, the wheat field became one of his great color laboratories. Under the southern sun, he painted sowers, harvesters, sheaves and millstones with intense yellows opposed to the blues of the sky. The motif is never only picturesque. Van Gogh associates the growth of wheat with human time, and the figure of the reaper can evoke work, the end of a cycle and the beginning again. In Saint-Rémy, where he is staying voluntarily at the Saint-Paul asylum from May 1889 to May 1890, an enclosed field visible from the establishment became a repeated subject. He paints it green after the rain, yellow under the sun, agitated by the wind or crossed by a reaper. THE walls, cypresses and mountains give each state a different structure. Short, curved or parallel touches do not decorate the surface: they render the direction of the stems, the air and the relief. In May 1890, Van Gogh joined Auvers-sur-Oise. During his last weeks, he worked in the fields around the village and often adopted a very elongated horizontal format. Green fields, houses, divergent roads, crows and storm clouds carry tensions varied, but it would be misleading to read each painting as a direct announcement of his death. Field of wheat to crows belongs to a broader body of research on space, climate and color. Van Gogh died in Auvers in July 1890. A faithful reproduction must retain the direction of the keys, the yellow-blue or green-purple contrasts, the variable thickness of the material and the horizon line which regulates the pressure of the sky on the field. The "Fields of" selection ble de Van Gogh's" notably compares A Wheat Field with Cypresses - Vincent van Gogh and Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun - Vincent van Gogh. His reading favors the atmosphere.

For Van Gogh, wheat is never a yellow surface: each touch follows a shoot, a breath of wind or a gesture of work and gives the field its own life.