Field with Poppies

Van Gogh painted this in the south, at Arles, in the summer of 1888, the astonishing months when he was finishing a canvas almost every day under the Provencal sun. It is not a grand subject, just a strip of red poppies in a summer meadow, but it carries the heat and speed of that season, the color laid on straight and fast. In August a young army lieutenant named Milliet, a friend who had been trading drawing lessons for Vincent's talk about painting, set off for Paris. Van Gogh handed him a bundle of pictures to deliver to his brother Theo, and this field of poppies went north in that parcel, rolled up with the rest.