Champs de blé avec meules

For about a week in late June 1888 Van Gogh barely left the wheat fields outside Arles, in the south of France, racing to paint the harvest before it was carted away. He told his brother Theo he was working 'quickly, quickly, quickly, and in a hurry, just like the harvester who is silent under the blazing sun.' This is one of roughly ten canvases from that fortnight, built from stacked sheaves and stubble in the old-gold yellows he kept describing in his letters. He had come south only a few months earlier, chasing stronger light than the north could give him, and the flat plain of the Crau behind Arles handed him exactly the wide, sun-struck fields he wanted. The paint is laid on fast and thick, the strokes following the lie of the cut grain.