家と耕す人のいる風景

Van Gogh painted this in the autumn of 1889, while he was a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. What's unusual is the angle. He looks down on the valley from high up, almost a bird's-eye view, so the ploughed furrows, the little house, the working ploughman and the distant cypresses all tilt up toward you. He was obsessed with Japanese prints, and this steep, flattened way of seeing a landscape was his attempt to look at the world the way they did. The diagonals run right across the field and pull your eye through it. After his death the painting vanished into a German private collection, was thought lost for decades, and only resurfaced at the Hermitage in 1995.