Rand eines Weizenfelds mit Mohnblumen

By the summer of 1887 Van Gogh was walking out past the last streets of Paris to paint. The city still ran into open country beyond Montmartre, with wheat growing in sight of the boulevards, and the Denver Art Museum, which owns this one, says it cannot pin down which field it is.

What it can say is that this is the first time he painted a bare field under open sky with no farmer and no animal in it, the motif he kept returning to through the three years he had left, as far as the wheat fields at Auvers. He was buying Japanese prints that year and pushing his compositions off centre the way they do. The colour runs on straight oppositions, the orange-yellow of the field against the blue above it, with the poppies dropped in as separate dashes of red. It is painted on canvas laid down on pasteboard, 40 centimetres tall, and it reached Denver only recently, from the collection of the businessman Frederic Hamilton.