Champ de blé avec un moissonneur

Van Gogh painted this in September 1889 from inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he'd voluntarily committed himself that spring after a series of breakdowns. The wheatfield is the one he could see through the barred window of his room, and he painted it several times as the crop ripened and was cut. The reaper meant something specific to him. He wrote to his brother Theo that he saw in this figure, struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day, an image of death — and yet, he added, nothing sad in it, death under a sun of pure gold. The wheat is laid on in thick ropes of yellow, almost sculpted.