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66 Art Works
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by: Vincent Van Gogh
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Vincent Van Gogh
(Dutch, 1853-1890)
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Wheat Field with Sun and Cloud.
1889
Black chalk, reed pen and brown ink, heightened with white chalk, on Ingres paper,
47.5 x 56 cm (18 3/4 x 22 in);
Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo
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Green Wheat Field.
1889
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm (28 3/4 x 36 1/4 in);
Loan at Kunsthaus, Zurich
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Wheat Field.
1889
Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92.5 cm (29 x 36 1/2 in);
Narodni Galerie, Prague.
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Cypresses.
1889
Oil on canvas, 93.3 x 74 cm (36 3/4 x 29 1/8 in);
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Wheatfield with Cypresses.
Sept. 1889
Reduction of June 1889 original;
Oil on canvas, 51.5 x 65 cm; Private Collection.
The last two years of Van Gogh's life were productive of marvellous pictures--painted though they were under
constant strain. During this period he travelled far from his Impressionist starting-point in Paris. The equable
balance of Impressionism was replaced by an emotional turbulence. Calm objectivity gave way to the expression of
intense feeling. Yet there remains an evolution that can be traced back to the time when his brother first showed
him works by Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Cézanne and when he first began to apply separate patches of color in the
manner of Seurat. The freedom and variety in the use of the brush that counted for so much in Impressionist painting
still belong to his later work, though exaggerated and distorted by the agitations and difficult circumstances that
followed his quarrel with Gauguin. The Neo-Impressionist juxtaposition of near-primary colors was also exaggerated
to a point of intense brilliance.
This picture was painted at St Rémy in Provence after he had entered the asylum there in May 1889 and was one of
three versions. It is possibly the painting he refers to in a letter to Theo written towards the end of June with
"a cornfield very yellow" and the cypress--a tree just then "always occupying my thoughts" that was "a splash of
black in a sunny landscape". The whirling brushstrokes of the sky may at first give the disturbing suggestion of
mental imbalance and violence beyond control, but the longer the picture is considered the more consistent it appears
as a whole in the multitude of curves that twist and turn and repeat themselves throughout. Nor is it to be supposed
that Van Gogh was incapable of anything else. The flame-like form of the cypress sets a key that is followed through
with a pervading vibration that represents a sustained effort.
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