Campo recintato con aratore

In the autumn of 1889 Vincent van Gogh was a voluntary patient in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, and many of his paintings from that year are simply the view out of his window. This is one of them. He wrote to his brother Theo about it, a field of yellow stubble being turned over, the purple of the freshly ploughed earth set against the pale rows, hills in the distance. A single ploughman works the ground. The little windmills on the horizon were not really there. He added them from memory, from the flat Dutch country of his childhood, stitched onto a Provençal hillside he could see from his room.