Wheat Fields

In May 1890 Van Gogh left the asylum in the south of France and came north to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the Oise just outside Paris, to live near a doctor who was meant to watch over him. He had about ten weeks left. In that short stretch he worked at an astonishing rate, better than one finished canvas a day, and the flat wheat fields on the plateau above the village became his main subject. Several he painted in a wide, low format that lets the grain fill the frame and run up to a thin band of sky. The cool greens and blues were a deliberate calming after the hot yellows of Provence; he wrote to his brother Theo that coming back north felt almost like a homecoming. He shot himself among fields like these in late July and died two days later, on the 29th, at 37.