Champ de blé clos au soleil levant

For the year he spent as a patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, this walled wheatfield was most of Van Gogh's world. He could see it from the barred window of his room, and he painted it over and over through the seasons, under snow, in high summer, at harvest. This one is a sunrise from late in 1889, the young green wheat set against a low band of purple hills and a sun ringed by a wide yellow halo. He wrote to his brother Theo that he was trying to catch calm, a great peace. The deep furrows run straight back toward the stone wall he could not cross.