Summer evening in Arles

In the summer of 1888 Van Gogh was in Arles, in the south of France, working himself hard among the wheat fields as the harvest came in. He wrote to his brother Theo that week that he had spent it under a blazing sun, and that these yellow, old-gold landscapes were done quickly, quickly, quickly. This is one of them, a field of ripe wheat in the evening with the sun low on the horizon and the town behind it, its factory chimneys trailing smoke. He had come south that spring full of a plan to gather other painters around him into a kind of studio of the south. These harvest canvases belong to that hopeful first summer, months before Gauguin came to join him in the autumn.