Champ de blé aux cyprès

In the summer of 1889, from the asylum at Saint-Remy, Van Gogh became fixed on the cypress trees standing on the hills around him. He wrote to his brother that no one had really looked at them properly, that in line and proportion they were as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk, and he set out to paint them the way he had painted his sunflowers. Here a single dark column of cypress rises at the edge of a wheatfield, with low rolling hills and a sky full of curling, turning cloud behind it. He made several versions of this composition that summer and autumn, working the paint into thick ridges you can almost feel. The wheat, the low hills and the clouds are all set moving in the same restless rhythm, while the one dark cypress holds still and upright at the field's edge.