Campo Cercado com Lavrador

Van Gogh painted this at the end of August 1889, a few months after he had committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south of France. From the window of his room he could see a walled field, and he worked at it again and again through the seasons. He described this one to his brother Theo plainly: yellow stubble being ploughed, the purple of turned earth against the strips of pale gold, hills behind. He did take liberties with the view, adding two trees at the upper left and shrinking the mountains. The wall that closes off the field was real, part of the asylum grounds, and the ploughman goes about his work inside it.