Enclosed Field with Ploughman

Van Gogh painted this in October 1889, a few months after he had committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south of France. From the window of his room he could see a walled field, and he worked at it again and again through the seasons. He described this one to his brother Theo plainly: yellow stubble being ploughed, the purple of turned earth against the strips of pale gold, hills behind. The one thing he added from memory was the row of small windmills on the skyline. The wall that closes off the field was real, part of the asylum grounds, and the ploughman goes about his work inside it.