Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted in the summer of 1889 while Vincent van Gogh was a voluntary patient at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Wheat Field with Cypresses depicts a sunlit Provençal landscape of golden ripening wheat, towering dark cypress trees, pale olive bushes, the distant Alpilles mountains, and a swirling azure sky filled with white clouds. The composition is animated throughout by Van Gogh's characteristic impasto technique, with thick, energetic brushstrokes that convey the heat of the afternoon sun and the movement of the wind across the land. A Dutch Post-Impressionist working at the height of his expressive powers, Van Gogh described the painting in a letter to his brother Theo as one of his best summer landscapes. The work exists in three oil versions and a reed-pen drawing, with the first and most celebrated version—painted en plein air—now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.