El campo de trigo detrás del hospital de Saint-Paul, Saint-Rémy

For a year, from 1889, Van Gogh was a voluntary patient in the asylum at Saint-Remy, and the one piece of open country he could see was a walled wheat field beneath the barred window of his room. He painted it over and over through the seasons. This small canvas comes from late in that year, November or December, worked in quieter, greyer colours than people expect of him. He described the place to his brother Theo almost simply: through the iron bars, a square of wheat inside its enclosure, and the morning sun coming up over it. The wall that shut him in is the same wall that gives the field its shape, running flat across the picture before the ground climbs toward the low Alpilles hills beyond.