Haystacks under a Rainy Sky

This is one of the last things Van Gogh painted. In July 1890 he was at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, working at a furious pace, sometimes a canvas a day, out among the wheat fields after the harvest. Here a great stack of cut wheat fills most of the frame, heavy and golden, while above it the sky churns with grey and white in long wet strokes, a rain shower passing through. He painted several of these field pictures on the same wide, low format that summer, a shape he liked for open country. Within a few weeks of setting this one down he was dead, at 37. The stack still stands where the reapers left it, out in the open, waiting out the weather.