Women Crossing the Fields

Van Gogh painted this at Auvers-sur-Oise in the summer of 1890, in the last weeks of his life, when he was turning out canvases at an astonishing rate. Two women walk a curving path in wide yellow sun hats, one in patterned blue, the other in white, with rows of potato plants running off behind them toward a blue-roofed house and low hills. He built the whole thing from short repeated strokes, dots and dashes that make the hats and skirts seem to sway as the pair moves along. It is painted on paper rather than canvas, quickly, the way he worked that July. He died at the end of that month, and the picture crossed the ocean to Texas by way of a private bequest.