The Museum · the collection
Wheat Fields
Jacob van Ruisdael, ca. 1670. Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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 sandy road leads straight into the picture between fields of ripe wheat. A few people walk along it, very small. On the left is a stand of trees, and beyond it the flat Dutch countryside runs to the horizon. But most of the painting is sky. Great piles of cloud move across it, and their shadows move across the land, so that some fields are bright and others dark. Ruisdael was one of the great Dutch landscape painters, and he understood that in a flat country, the sky is the scenery. Your eye walks down the road and then lifts up to the clouds.
Look closely
- Find the people on the road. Where are they going?
- Look at where the sunlight falls on the fields and where it doesn’t.
- Compare how much of the canvas is sky and how much is land.
While you sit
A big sky over a quiet road. Let the clouds do the moving.
Your seat in the galleries: a Dutch-style oak roadside bench, painted sage green.
About the work
- Title
- Wheat Fields
- Artist
- Jacob van Ruisdael
- Date
- ca. 1670
- From
- Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Size
- 39 3/8 x 51 1/4 in. (100 x 130.2 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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