Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889 by Vincent van Gogh
Canvas Print - 1161-VVG

A pair of cypresses rises on the right like a dark flame, their green so deep it reads almost as black against the pale turquoise sky. Everything around them is in motion. The wheat leans and ripples in ochre and lemon yellow, an olive bush on the left billows up in silvery green, and the clouds overhead coil into scrolls of white and lilac. Only the cypresses hold their ground, and even they seem to twist as they climb.

Vincent van Gogh had been preoccupied with these trees since entering the asylum of Saint-Paul de Mausole at St-Rémy in May 1889. Writing to his brother Theo that June, he said he hoped to do for cypresses what he had done for sunflowers, because as far as he could tell nobody had yet painted them the way he saw them. He admired their shape, which reminded him of an Egyptian obelisk, and the refined quality of their green, the one dark accent in a sunlit country. You can test that idea here: cover the cypresses with your hand and the whole picture loses its anchor.

Wheatfield with Cypresses exists in several versions. Van Gogh first painted the scene outdoors in late June, allowed beyond the hospital walls only with an escort, and treated that canvas, now in New York, as a first study. This one, in the National Gallery in London, followed in September, when a relapse kept him shut in his room. Working from the earlier picture rather than the field itself, he pushed the forms toward pattern. The clouds become rhythmic loops, the hills a band of blue and violet waves, the small tree in the middle distance a single dark disc. He felt his aims ran close to those of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, who were moving away from Impressionism toward simplified form, and he counted the result among his finest summer landscapes.

The brushwork carries the weather. Van Gogh wrote of painting in the mistral, the cold wind that sweeps through Provence, and here it seems to pass through everything at once: the grain, the foliage, the clouds, even the mountains. The paint sits less thickly than in the first version, yet each stroke still curls into the next, so that sky and earth are stitched together by one continuous movement. The sinuous line looks ahead to Art Nouveau, but it never settles into ornament. It stays restless, and it always means something.

There are no people in this landscape, no reaper with a scythe. Still, for Van Gogh the wheat stood for more than farming. In a letter to his sister that July he mused that we who live on bread are partly wheat ourselves, rooted in place like a plant whatever our imagination might wish, and cut down once we are ripe. Look again at the field: already gold, a few red poppies flickering at its edge, and above it those two dark trees, keeping watch.