The Plain of Auvers

At the end of June 1890, in a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh sketched this field next to a quick drawing of a portrait he had just finished, Doctor Gachet's daughter Marguerite at her piano. He thought the two canvases belonged together, one tall and pink, the other long, in pale green and green-yellow, each bringing out the other. Today the portrait is in Basel and this plain is in Vienna. After Theo died, his widow Jo van Gogh-Bonger placed it with an Amsterdam dealer. In 1903 it was shown at the Vienna Secession, the artists' association that then acquired it, and in 1909 the Secession gave it to the Modern Gallery, founded in 1903 as the forerunner of today's Belvedere. Against those cool fields, the warmest notes are the red and orange flowers scattered through the foreground.