Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun

From the window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he had admitted himself in 1889, Van Gogh could see a small wheatfield closed in by a stone wall. He painted it many times. In late June he wrote to Theo that he was working on a reaper, a faint figure toiling in the heat under an enormous sun, and that it was perhaps the brightest canvas he had ever made. He told his brother he saw the reaper as an image of death, with humanity as the wheat being cut down, and yet, he wrote, there was nothing sad in it. It happened in broad daylight, under a sun that flooded everything with gold. He found it strange, he said, that he had seen it that way through the iron bars of his cell. Everything here is yellow, except for the line of violet hills behind the field.