Um Prado nas Montanhas: Le Mas de Saint-Paul

Van Gogh painted this in December 1889, from inside the asylum of Saint-Paul near Saint-Rémy in Provence. He had committed himself there voluntarily that May, after the breakdown in Arles, and the staff let him use a spare cell as a studio. At first he could only paint the garden and what he saw from his window. As he was allowed further out, he turned to the wheat fields and hills around the walls, which he thought of as the true face of Provence. You can pick out the farmhouse, Le Mas de Saint-Paul, low among the fields. Everything rolls and curves here, the furrows, the hills, the sky, in the restless rounded stroke of his final year. He made roughly 150 canvases during that single year of confinement.