La vigna rossa

In November 1888 van Gogh was in Arles, watching workers bring in the grape harvest under a low autumn sun, and the whole field seemed to him to burn red. He painted it from memory a few days later, telling his brother Theo the vines had turned the colour of wine. Two years on, this canvas went to the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and sold for 400 francs to the Belgian painter Anna Boch, whose brother Eugène was a friend van Gogh had already portrayed. It is the one painting he is known to have sold for money in his lifetime, and he died the following summer never knowing that was so. The picture later passed to the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov, whose holdings were nationalised after the Revolution, which is how the only van Gogh he sold ended up in Russia.