Wheat Field with Cypresses

Van Gogh painted this view of wheat fields and cypresses in June 1889, during his voluntary stay at an asylum in the south of France. He could see this exact landscape from his bedroom window. The canvas is roughly square, 29 by 37 inches. A road curves through the lower left, cutting past a low stone wall. Behind it, golden wheat fills the middle ground, rippling in lines that look like wind made visible. Two cypress trees stand dark against a sky of swollen, rolling clouds. The blues are deep: cobalt, ultramarine, almost black in the shadows of the trees. Van Gogh had been at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole since May 1889, after the ear incident in Arles. He was allowed to paint outdoors under supervision, and he produced some of his most concentrated work that summer: Starry Night, the iris paintings, and this wheat field series. He wrote to his brother Theo about the cypresses, calling them 'beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.' By 1889, Impressionism's last group exhibition was already nine years past. Gauguin was in Pont-Aven. Seurat was showing La Grande Jatte. Cezanne was working alone in Aix. Van Gogh's paintings from this period sit alongside those developments but do not belong to any of them. He was doing something lonelier and more physical: painting what he saw with a thickness and urgency that nobody else was attempting. Oil on canvas, 73 by 92 centimeters. Van Gogh painted with heavy impasto, building the wheat field in thick ridges of yellow ochre and chrome yellow. You can see the brushmarks in person: short, directional strokes, sometimes laid on with the palette knife. The paint is dense enough to cast shadows on the canvas surface. The strong verticals of the cypress trees and the horizontal sweep of the wheat field make this print work well above a sofa or a console table, where it has room to breathe. The dominant blues and golds pair well with white walls, natural wood, and linen upholstery. In a smaller space, the 16x20 framed version holds its own without overwhelming the room. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1993, purchased with funds from the Annenberg Foundation. It has been on near-continuous display in the European Paintings galleries since then. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.