The Wheatfield behind Saint Paul's Hospital with a Reaper

Van Gogh painted this in September 1889 from the window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown that cost him part of his ear. Beyond the hospital wall lay a wheatfield, and he painted it over and over through the seasons. Here a single reaper works the ripe crop under a high sun. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent said he saw death in that figure, with humanity as the wheat being cut down, and yet he insisted the image was not gloomy. It was, he wrote, almost smiling, everything bathed in gold. He worked the whole field in swirling yellow, the reaper barely there, a few strokes of blue and green.