Wheat Field with Alpilles View

D17, 13200 Arles, France

Wheat Field with Alpilles View

"What I’d like to know is the effect of a more intense blue in the sky. Fromentin and Gerome see the earth in the south as colourless, and a whole lot of people saw it that way. My God, yes, if you take dry sand in your hand and if you look at it closely. Water, too, air, too, considered this way, are colourless. No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely. Ah well, you’ll tell me that I write you nothing but banalities. Handshake in thought." Vincent To Emile Bernard. Arles, on or about Thursday, 7 June 1888. After returning from Saintes Maries de la Mer

Currently Located:

Van Gogh Museum - Amsterdam

Details:

Painting Date

15th of June 1888

Painting Type

Cypresses Oil on Canvas Paintings The Harvest Wheat Fields

Detailed Image Links

Description:

Vincent viewed this with his back to the Tarascon road, same stretch of road is in Trunk of an old Yew Tree – F 573.

My dear Theo,

I’ve just read Geffroy’s article on Claude Monet.1 What he says is really very good. How I’d love to see that exhibition! If I console myself for not seeing it, it’s because when I look around me there are many things in nature that hardly leave me time to think about anything else. Because it’s harvest time just now.

I had a letter from Bernard, who says he feels very isolated but works all the same — and has written a new poem about himself in which he makes fun of himself in a rather touching way.

And he asks: ‘what’s the use of working’? But he asks that while working; he tells himself that work’s of no use whatsoever, while working — which is not at all the same thing as saying it while not working. I’d very much like to see what he’s doing.

I’m curious to know what Gauguin will do, and if Bernardwon’t go to join him in Pont-Aven; I already gave each of them the other’s address a while ago, because they could need one another.2

I’ve had a week of concentrated hard work in the wheatfields right out in the sun, the result was some studies of wheatfields, landscapes3 and — a sketch of a sower. In a ploughed field, a large field of clods of purple earth — rising towards the horizon — a sower in blue and white. On the horizon a field of short, ripe wheat. 1v:2

Above all that a yellow sky with a yellow sun.4

You can sense from the mere nomenclature of the tonalities — that colour plays a very important role in this composition.

And the sketch as such — a no. 25 canvas — also worries me a lot, in the sense that I wonder whether I shouldn’t take it seriously and make a tremendous painting out of it. My God, how I’d love to do that. But I just wonder whether I’ll have the necessary power of execution.

I’m putting the sketch aside just as it is, hardly daring to think about it.

To Theo van Gogh. Arles, Thursday, 21 June 1888

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“What I’d like to know is the effect of a more intense blue in the sky. Fromentin and Gerome see the earth in the south as colourless, and a whole lot of people saw it that way. My God, yes, if you take dry sand in your hand and if you look at it closely. Water, too, air, too, considered this way, are colourless. No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely. Ah well, you’ll tell me that I write you nothing but banalities. Handshake in thought.”

Vincent To Emile Bernard. Arles, on or about Thursday, 7 June 1888. After returning from Saintes Maries de la Mer

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Painting, Oil on Canvas on Cardboard
Arles: June 15, 1888
Van Gogh Museum
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe
F: 411, JH: 1476

Where Vincent Was:

Arles

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Wheat Field with Alpilles View