Champ de blé avec alouette

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in 1887, and Paris is the surprise here. We think of his wheat fields as the blazing south, Arles and Auvers, but this one comes from the two years he spent with his brother Theo in the city, learning from the Impressionists and the younger painters around him. You can see it in the light, broken sky, the flecked poppies and cornflowers, the loose woven strokes. He was trying out their brighter palette on a plain field just outside town. The lark climbing toward the upper left gives the whole thing its lift. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds it, actually catalogues the bird as a partridge.