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Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh · Post-Impressionism & Neo-Impressionism

Artist
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Date
1889
Dimensions
73.2 x 93.4 cm
Medium
Oil on canvas
Location
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States

Wheat Field with Cypresses shows a field of ripe golden wheat under a swirling summer sky in Provence, with a dark green cypress tree rising like a flame on the right, low olive trees and blue hills in the distance.

A closer look

Van Gogh painted this canvas in the summer of 1889, shortly after entering the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he was allowed to work in the surrounding fields. Everything moves: the wheat bends in the wind, the bushes curl, the clouds billow in white and pale blue spirals, and the cypress twists upwards. The paint is laid on thickly in rhythmic, curving strokes. Van Gogh was fascinated by cypresses, which he compared to Egyptian obelisks, and wrote that no one had yet painted them as he saw them.

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