Enclosed Field with Peasant

Van Gogh painted this in October 1889, from inside the asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence, where he had committed himself after the breakdown that cost him part of his ear. This is a corner of the walled wheat field he could see from his window, one he painted again and again through the seasons of his stay. A single peasant crosses it carrying a sheaf of wheat, with the jagged Alpilles mountains rising behind and only a thin strip of sky above. The brushwork churns and rolls, but the subject could hardly be plainer, a man doing ordinary autumn work in a field the painter was not free to walk out into himself.