Green Wheat Field

In May 1889, after the breakdown in Arles that ended with him cutting his own ear, Van Gogh checked himself into an asylum at Saint-Remy, a former monastery run as a hospital for the mentally ill. From the barred window of his upstairs room he could look down on a small wheat field held inside the grounds by a stone wall. This is that field, painted in June, in his first weeks as a patient, the crop still green and unripe. He wrote to his brother Theo that young green wheat had something pure and tender in it, the same feeling as a sleeping child. Past the wall the land runs out to olive groves and the low Alpilles hills. He painted it from inside those walls, looking down from his window at a field he could watch every day but was not yet free to wander through alone.