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Wheat Field with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Vincent van Gogh painted this view in 1889 while he was staying at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. The landscape he could see from there, with wheat in the foreground and the Alpilles hills behind, became a subject he returned to. The Metropolitan Museum's painting is one of three similar canvases of the scene made that year.
The paint is laid on thickly, in short curling strokes, so the wheat looks like it is moving in the wind. The cypress on the left is the darkest thing in the picture and the tallest, and it pulls the eye up into a sky of white and blue swirls. Van Gogh liked cypresses for their shape and described them in his letters as being as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk in line and proportion.
It is a small enough canvas, about 73 by 93 centimetres, but the brushwork gives it a lot of energy. Few landscapes show so clearly that a painter was working with the paint itself as much as with the view.
From the museum record
| Artist | Vincent van Gogh |
|---|---|
| Date | 1889 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Size | 28 13/16 × 36 3/4 in. (73.2 × 93.4 cm) |
| Museum | The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Credit line | Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 1993 |
| Accession number | 1993.132 |
| Licence | Open Access (CC0) |
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection record. Facts such as dates, sizes and credit lines come from that record. The write-up above was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the museum record and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
