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Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France.

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Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A golden wheat field under a swirling blue sky with white clouds, tall dark cypress trees on the right and green hills behind, painted in thick brushstrokes.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1889 in the south of France, and he liked it enough to make more versions. The ripe wheat is a field of moving yellow, the cypresses rise like a dark flame on the right, and the clouds turn and curl in a pale blue sky. The paint is thick and the brushstrokes all go in some direction, so everything in the picture seems to be in motion. He wrote in his letters that cypresses had beautiful lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. Even the hills in the distance roll. The day is hot, the wind is up, and it is all very much alive.

Look closely

  1. Follow one brushstroke in the sky. Where does it go?
  2. Compare the greens in the cypresses with the greens in the bushes.
  3. Find where the wheat meets the bushes. Is there a clear edge, or do they melt together?

While you sit

A windy summer afternoon. Let the field move around you while you sit still.

Your seat in the galleries: a sunflower-yellow slatted bench on dark iron legs.

About the work

Title
Wheat Field with Cypresses
Artist
Vincent van Gogh
Date
1889
From
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France
Medium
Oil on canvas
Size
28 13/16 × 36 3/4 in. (73.2 × 93.4 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

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