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When Van Gogh settled at Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890 he began working on canvases of an unusual shape, a metre wide and half a metre high, a double square. He painted 13 of them between the middle of June and the end of July, which is nearly all the time he had in the village. The shape suited what was in front of him, the open wheat country north of Paris in the middle of its harvest. In a letter to his brother Theo that July he said he had tried to put sadness and extreme loneliness into these wide fields, and in the same letter that what he found in the countryside was health and strength. This is one of those July canvases, painted when the stacks were already standing in the cut wheat.