Poppy field

Van Gogh painted this in June 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where he spent the last weeks of his life near his doctor and close to his brother Theo. He worked at an astonishing rate there, more than 70 paintings in about 70 days, going out into the fields almost daily. In this one he pushed the horizon high and let the poppies take over the foreground in ragged reds and greens, with a restless blue sky pressed into a narrow band along the top. It looks back a little at Monet, who had painted his own field of poppies years earlier, but Van Gogh crowds the flowers far closer to us. He shot himself in the chest about a month after finishing it, and died two days later at 37.