Bulb Fields

In the spring of 1883 Van Gogh was living in The Hague, still teaching himself to paint and leaning mostly on chalk and charcoal. This was one of his first attempts to work the fields in oil, and he did it in a corner of Holland where growers laid their flowers out in tidy commercial strips. So the bands of hyacinth you see, blue against yellow against pink, are not a designed pattern. They are the beds of a bulb merchant, each plot a different crop, seen from a low spot at the edge of the plain. Behind them sit thatched cottages and a line of bare trees, because it is early enough in the year that the trees have not come out yet while the bulbs already have. Van Gogh sold this one to his brother Theo's employers not long after finishing it, one of the very few paintings he managed to move in his lifetime.