Green Wheat Field with Cypress

Van Gogh painted this in late June of 1889, and he did it standing in an actual field. He was living inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France, admitted after the breakdown that had cost him part of his ear, and for weeks he had been working only from memory or from the view through his barred window. This was one of the first times he was let out through the gates to paint in the open air again. You can feel the release in it. The wheat is still green, ripening toward yellow in patches, and it churns under a sky that rolls the same way the stars roll in The Starry Night, which he had finished only days before. The dark cypress on the right was a tree he was fixated on that summer.