Champ de blé aux cyprès

Van Gogh painted this in the early summer of 1889, while he was a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Remy, in the south of France. Between his breakdowns the doctors let him out to work, and in the fields just beyond the walls he found the two things he wanted: ripe wheat and a stand of dark cypresses, trees he said were on his mind all the time and as beautiful in line as an Egyptian obelisk. He worked fast, outdoors, laying the paint on thick. The sky, he told his brother Theo, was a blue like a piece of Scotch plaid. The clouds roll and the trees writhe in the same restless brushwork he had just used for The Starry Night, made only weeks before. Later, from memory in his studio, he painted the composition twice more.