Ferme en Provence

Van Gogh reached Arles in February 1888 and stayed a little over a year, and in that short time he worked at a pace that is hard to believe, more than 200 paintings in roughly 15 months. This one comes from the summer, when the wheat around the town had ripened. It shows the gate to a farm, with stacks of hay behind a low wall and the crops going gold under a hard southern light. He was thinking hard about colour that year. The blue of the gate and the sky is set deliberately against the yellow of the straw so that each makes the other burn brighter, a trick with complementary colours he wrote about again and again in his letters. He described the wheat studies of that season as done quickly, quickly, quickly, in a hurry like the reaper under the blazing sun.