Green Ears of Wheat

By June 1888 Van Gogh had been down in Arles, in the south of France, for a few months, and the wheat was ripening in the heat. Most painters would have handed you the whole field under a wide sky. He did the opposite. He seems to have waded in and crouched until the stalks filled everything, close enough to read the ribbon-like leaves and the heavy, tilting heads of grain. He wrote to the painter Gauguin, the friend he was hoping to lure south, that he wanted nothing in it but ears of wheat under a shimmer of green and pink, the sound of them swaying in the wind. Look low in the green and you catch what he tucked in: a single blue cornflower on the left, a curl of pink bindweed near the bottom on the right.