Wheat Fields with Auvers in the Background

Auvers-sur-Oise was already a painters' village when Van Gogh arrived in May 1890. Charles-Francois Daubigny had lived and died there, Pissarro and Cezanne had worked in the lanes below it in the 1870s, and that reputation is part of why the place was suggested to him. Most of what he painted was not the village itself. He climbed to the plateau above it, where the fields run flat to the horizon, and looked back down the slope: wheat ripe in July across the foreground, the roofs and the church tower small at the bottom edge. He worked fast that summer, close to a canvas a day for 70 days. The same plateau gave him the wheatfield with crows a few weeks after this one.